Can you install an earlier version of a program with yum?

[ubersoft]

This is something that occurred on my machine running F17, but I don't think this is specifically an F17 question, which is why I put it here.

Last night F17 updated a number of packages, including wine. It updated wine from the stable 1.4 to the development 1.5.2, which introduced a mouse-jumping issue in one of the windows games I play. So I'd like to revert back to 1.4, and I was wondering if there was a way for yum to do that, or if I needed to just download the rpm, uninstall wine, and install the rpm "manually."

Also, what would I need to do to prevent yum from flagging it as an update every time I run it? Add exclude=wine* to /etc/yum.conf ?

[nonamedotc]

You can downgrade a package using yum. Simply use yum downgrade package_name. Of course, it is also possible to download the rpm and then install using yum.

[glennzo]

Originally Posted by ubersoft

Also, what would I need to do to prevent yum from flagging it as an update every time I run it? Add exclude=wine* to /etc/yum.conf ?

That should work flawlessly.

[Chilly Willy]

A few times I've tried that "downgrade" & it said that the package was NOT downgrade-able. So I take it that it is a "crapshot" if they are or not, or is there something else at play here?

[nonamedotc]

Originally Posted by Chilly Willy

A few times I've tried that "downgrade" & it said that the package was NOT downgrade-able. So I take it that it is a "crapshot" if they are or not, or is there something else at play here?

I am not too sure about this. I have not used it very often - but everytime I tried, it worked. From the man page,

downgrade

Will try and downgrade a package from the version currently installed to the previously highest version (or the specified version). The depsolver will not necessarily work, but if you specify all the packages it should work (thus, all the simple cases will work). Also this does not work for "installonly" packages, like Kernels. downgrade operates on groups, files, provides, filelists and rpm files just like the "install" command.

So, I guess, it is finicky on a package-by-package basis.

[aleph]

If all methods fail, you can still grab an older version from the Koji build system http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/

[AndrewSerk]

Most times you can get "downgrade" to work if you list the deps for downgrade also. For instance in order to downgrade firefox you would need something like:

yum downgrade firefox yelp xulrunner

But YMMV
Hope this helps,