Downgrading a Debian package

After I updated a Debian Wheezy server to Debian Jessie, I was having some problems with VLC. I was using the cvlc to capture and record video streams, but the capture would fail after 2 seconds. A colleague suggested that I leave the OS version alone, but downgrade VLC to confirm that the new version of VLC was causing the problem. A sound idea, but how do you downgrade a Debian package?

I found a variety of helpful sites and came up with the following:

1. Add the source for the downgraded package the apt config
2. Specify the target release in the apt config
3. Use “pinning” to tell apt to use the older versions for the package and its dependencies
4. Use apt-get install to install the dependencies and the package

Details as follows:

Add the source for the downgraded package the apt config
In this case, I needed to add the
I left my /etc/apt/sources.list as-is and added the following to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vlc.list:

deb http://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/debian/ wheezy main non-free contrib
deb-src http://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/debian/ wheezy main non-free contrib

deb http://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib non-free

I used Columbia’s mirror because it’s fast and geographically nearer than most of the other mirrors. I’m sure not all of those sources were necessary (there are no security-related packages in VLC) but it didn’t hurt anything to include them.

Specify the target release in the apt config
I added the following to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/80targetrelease to specify that I want Jessie to be the target/default release:

APT::Default-Release "jessie";

Use “pinning” to tell apt to use the older versions for package and its dependencies
I created the file /etc/apt/preferences.d/vlc containing the following. I added to the list of packages as apt-get install failed due to missing dependencies. The pin-priority 1001 was suggested by several sites to be used only in the case of downgrading a package.

Package: vlc
Pin: release n=wheezy
Pin-Priority: 1001

Package: xdg-utils
Pin: release n=wheezy
Pin-Priority: 1001

Use apt-get install to install the dependencies and the package
I started by trying to apt-get install vlc but it complained about missing dependencies. I added the dependencies to the preferences file as describe in the section above, and then was able to install the following packages from Debian Wheezy:

apt-get install libvlccore5
apt-get install vlc-data
apt-get install libvlc5
apt-get install vlc-nox

Alternatively, I believe I could have skipped the preferences file and setting the pin-priorities by specifying the target Debian version when running apt-get install:

apt-get install -t wheezy libvlccore5
apt-get install -t wheezy vlc-data
apt-get install -t wheezy libvlc5
apt-get install -t wheezy vlc-nox

However, I’m not sure that the desired package version would be preserved after running apt-get dist-upgrade.

References
The following sites were helpful to me while I was figuring out how to do this, and if you are interested in pin-priority and the different values to use in different scenarios, I definitely recommend the first link:

• Using the preferences file on Debian and Debian based distributions
• How to install a specific version of a Debian package using apt-get
• How to install specific version of some package?
• How to install a single Jessie package on Wheezy?
• Debian Wiki: AptPreferences