Add the possibility to install a previous version of some package

[cars10w]

I would like to be able to install an old / previous version of some package. For example svn v1.7 instead of v1.8

What flavour would you prefer:

1. Some gloval prev-option which will install previous versions for all packages.
   • pact install-prev pkg1 [pkg2 ... pkgN]
   • pact install --prev pkg1 [pkg2 ... pkgN]
2. A prev-option that needs to be applied to each package that you want a previous version for.
   • pact install pkg1 --prev pkg2 pkg3
   • In this example you install the latest versions for pkg1 and pkg3, and the previous one for pkg2

[cars10w]

The install-prev variant is the simplest one and easily understood by users. But it is not as flexible as flavour 2, because you need to run pact two times if you want to install old+new packages at the same time.

Also what about dependency hell when mixing uptodate packages and previous ones?

[v-yadli]

+1. Currently libgcc1 stayed at 4.8.3.2 and the updated setup.ini points to 4.9.9.2, which means that anything that rely on newer version of libgcc1 will not run, while updating libgcc1 is not quite possible. What I did is to manually edit setup.ini and remove the entries of newer version, because pact looks for the first match.

[tombujok]

There's only 2 versions of every package in cygwin repo - so it would be possible to install the second to newest one only, but it's feasible, 5 new lines in pact and done 👍 anybody volunteering?

[binarymelon]

Is there a way to manually do this while a solution is worked on?

[rdlaner]

Any update on this??

[hiredgunhouse]

Would love to see that happening, I'm thinking about Emacs 24 cause Spacemacs does not support Emacs 25 yet.

[hiredgunhouse]

Ok, I've tried to change the pact script to support that, here's my patch: babun_pact_installprev.patch
Try using installprev instead of install as the parameter.
An important thing to note is that it does not apply to dependencies so you should keep that in mind and either install specific earlier versions of dependencies of specify them in proper order on the command line.
BEWARE: this is a quick and ugly hack (I'm a linux noob).