Trying to downgrade a program from AUR

General system Newbie
1

I accidentally allowed a program with a subscription to update, and because I don’t want to pay for a new subscription, I want to downgrade by loading an older version. I found some hints here: Downgrade a package coming from AUR repository - #16 by Locutus

It talks about using Git to restore the file from the AUR repository, but looking up the git command, it’s pretty formidable if you’ve never used it.

The version of the program called ‘motivewave’ I’m trying to reload is version 6.8.3, and I believe it’s here: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/PKGBUILD?h=motivewave&id=21b092474d2e5b78ec4e2103fe5df0b5f49146c3

Where do I begin?

2

Have a look in ~/.cache/yay/<program name>

You are looking for files ending zst, then sudo pacman -U /path/to/file.zst

1 Like
3

I got this:
bash: /home/mark/.cache/yay/motivewave: Is a directory
[mark@mark-optiplex9020 ~]$ cd .cache/yay/motivewave
[mark@mark-optiplex9020 motivewave]$ ls -l
total 168536
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 83326808 Jan 28 2023 motivewave-6.6.13.deb
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 89231430 Dec 27 2022 motivewave-6.6.3.deb
drwxr-xr-x 3 mark mark 4096 Jan 28 2023 pkg
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 914 Jan 28 2023 PKGBUILD
drwxr-xr-x 2 mark mark 4096 Jan 28 2023 src
[mark@mark-optiplex9020 motivewave]$
looks like it’s storing an older version than what I had most recently.

4

How did you install? A different aur helper?

1 Like
5

I used paru…

6

~/.cache/paru/clone/motivewave

1 Like
7

e.g.

ls -lah ~/.cache/paru/clone/waybar-git/
   rwxr-xr-x     4      4 KiB   Fri Oct 27 23:05:11 2023    ./
   rwxr-xr-x   353     12 KiB   Sun Dec 31 15:49:02 2023    ../
   rwxr-xr-x     8      4 KiB   Fri Oct 27 23:04:34 2023    .git/
   rwxr-xr-x     7    156 B     Fri Oct 27 23:04:49 2023    waybar-git/
   rw-r--r--     1      1 KiB   Fri Oct 27 23:04:51 2023    PKGBUILD 
   rw-r--r--     1      1 KiB   Thu Aug 24 21:22:11 2023    .SRCINFO 
   rw-r--r--     1    995 KiB   Wed Oct 25 11:18:16 2023    waybar-git-r2978.a459d8a9-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst 
   rw-r--r--     1    994 KiB   Thu Oct 26 13:37:47 2023    waybar-git-r2986.1618ee78-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst 
   rw-r--r--     1    994 KiB   Thu Oct 26 20:02:10 2023    waybar-git-r2989.9ef8faf9-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst 
   rw-r--r--     1    994 KiB   Thu Oct 26 23:09:49 2023    waybar-git-r2990.95b0647c-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst 
   rw-r--r--     1    995 KiB   Fri Oct 27 23:05:11 2023    waybar-git-r2992.e46f66b4-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
1 Like
8

[mark@mark-optiplex9020 ~]$ ls -lah ~/.cache/paru/clone/motivewave
total 765M
drwxr-xr-x 3 mark mark 4.0K Dec 27 07:51 .
drwxr-xr-x 54 mark mark 4.0K Dec 4 13:15 …
drwxr-xr-x 8 mark mark 4.0K Dec 27 07:50 .git
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 22 Nov 12 15:41 .gitignore
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 98M Nov 26 2022 motivewave-6.6.10-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 80M Nov 26 2022 motivewave-6.6.10.deb
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 81M May 21 2023 motivewave-6.6.15.deb
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 86M Dec 27 2022 motivewave-6.6.3.deb
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 115M Nov 12 15:42 motivewave-6.8.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 96M Nov 12 15:42 motivewave-6.8.3.deb
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 116M Dec 27 07:51 motivewave-6.8.6-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 97M Dec 27 07:50 motivewave-6.8.6.deb
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 962 Dec 27 07:50 PKGBUILD
-rw-r–r-- 1 mark mark 549 Dec 27 07:50 .SRCINFO
[mark@mark-optiplex9020 ~]$
version 6.8.3 is the one I’m trying to recover, just before the more recent 6.8.6

9 
sudo pacman -U motivewave-6.8.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

cd into the directory first or use full path.

2 Likes
10

Would it be beneficial to use paru to uninstall the current one before I install the older one, or would it matter?

11

Dunno, never used the program, probably would not hurt.

12

Working fine now. Thanks for your help!

13

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