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I need an old version of qt5 for anki. (qt5-5.7)

Therefore I would like to downgrade all qt5-packages (the whole group).

Is there a way to do this with pacman?

linuscl
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    Oh wow, when you said "group" in chat I never imagined you meant something like this! Note that downgrading all qt5 packages will very likely break everything that depends on them. Depending on your system, that can be several dozen packages. Are you sure this is worth it? You might want to look into setting up some sort of chrooted system or installing from scratch in a virtual machine. This answer might help. – terdon Mar 10 '17 at 18:43

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As a fellow Arch Linux user, for someone who uses Arch as his main OS I will help you out as best I can.

You can do this but you have dependencies which can break just as Terdon very well described in the comments but we will avoid that happening if performed correctly.

I will refer to Arch's wiki on downgrading packages through the pacman cache to provide the answer, but note that only perform this process if you installed qt5-5.7 prior.

Downgrading Packages (Arch Wiki Reference):

This process will remove the current package and install the older version. Dependency changes will be handled, but pacman will not handle version conflicts. If a library or other package needs to be downgraded with the packages, please be aware that you will have to downgrade this package yourself as well.

Clearly, it's a bit of a manual job, but it's quick and also note that you can pass multiple packages through pacman so this will help with your group:

Load up your terminal and cd into this directory > /var/cache/pacman/pkg/

Proceed with > pacman -U <file_name_of_the_package>


Alternatively, you can obtain tools such as downgrade which will automate this process for you, but only possible if you've cleared your cache and use the Arch Rollback Machine

  • Do you think it would be better to downgrade the whole system to a specific date (where it worked) like described here -> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_Archive#How_to_restore_all_packages_to_a_specific_date ? In this case I would get security issues (firefox outdated, ...etc) – linuscl Mar 11 '17 at 09:34
  • Your idea in a bash script: http://pastebin.com/KYC66j4f Correct? (The packages have to be in pacman-cache of course) – linuscl Mar 11 '17 at 09:49