What if you need old packages?

dhave · 2007-09-21 17:13:43

I have become very attached to Arch. It has many of the things I appreciated about Slackware and Gentoo but is a better fit for my present situation.

One frustration, though, has been access to old packages. For example, today I needed to downgrade to a pre-2.6.21 kernel. I didn't have anything older than 2.6.21 in /var/cache/pacman/pkg, and my online searches didn't turn anything up. Finally, I found an iso image of Voodoo and downloaded it, burned a CD, and got the 2.6.20 kernel package off of that. I was glad to find it, but it wasn't easy, and it took a good long while.

Surely there's a better way.

What do most of you do when you really need an old package that's no longer in your pacman cache.

Thanks.

Dusty · 2007-09-21 17:21:30

There's not a 100% easy way to do it, but the usual advice is to go through the Arch search form, find the package you want and download the older PKGBUILD revision from CVS. Then build the package using makepkg.

Dusty

lucke · 2007-09-21 17:32:44

Some older packages are hosted by phrakture. Some mirrors kept even older packages, but I don't know if that's still the case.

dhave · 2007-09-21 17:48:51

Dusty wrote:

There's not a 100% easy way to do it, but the usual advice is to go through the Arch search form, find the package you want and download the older PKGBUILD revision from CVS. Then build the package using makepkg.
Dusty

Thank you, Dusty. One more question: Wouldn't I need to edit the PKGBUILD to match the older version?

BTW, when I say "old packages", I'm not talking about museum exhibits. The kernel version I needed was from April of this year, for example. I would have thought some Archer out there would maintain an historical archive, or is that counter to the rolling update philosophy?

dhave · 2007-09-21 17:52:00

lucke wrote:

Some older packages are hosted by phrakture. Some mirrors kept even older packages, but I don't know if that's still the case.

Thanks, lucke. I've used phraktured.net a few times and have found what I needed, but I don't think he's trying to keep a whole lot of older packages around.

Maybe this is one area in which my mindset is counter to arch's. I like older versions of a lot of things. I still run Windows 2000, for example, and I haven't updated Word in eight years.

I do like to keep my Linux installation up to date, but there are still times when an older version is preferable for one reason or another, as long as it doesn't conflict with the rest of your system.

fwojciec · 2007-09-21 18:08:03

dhave wrote:

Wouldn't I need to edit the PKGBUILD to match the older version?

This is why Dusty mentioned the CVS - you can get older versions of PKGBUILDs from there. You could obviously edit it by hand as well, and in some cases it is much easier to do it that way, actually.

dhave · 2007-09-21 20:41:07

fwojciec wrote:

dhave wrote:
Wouldn't I need to edit the PKGBUILD to match the older version?
This is why Dusty mentioned the CVS - you can get older versions of PKGBUILDs from there. You could obviously edit it by hand as well, and in some cases it is much easier to do it that way, actually.

O.K., thanks. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to dig up the older PKGBUILDs, but I think I managed to. I'll give it a try.

Arch Linux

#1 2007-09-21 17:13:43

What if you need old packages?

#2 2007-09-21 17:21:30

Re: What if you need old packages?

#3 2007-09-21 17:32:44

Re: What if you need old packages?

#4 2007-09-21 17:48:51

Re: What if you need old packages?

#5 2007-09-21 17:52:00

Re: What if you need old packages?

#6 2007-09-21 18:08:03

Re: What if you need old packages?

#7 2007-09-21 20:41:07

Re: What if you need old packages?

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