When a package update breaks something, I sometimes need to downgrade to the previous version temporarily. I would like to ignore only the currently broken version, while still being notified when a newer version becomes available and then have the package removed from the ignore list automatically. The downgrade itself is manageable, but manually editing IgnorePkg, monitoring release pages, and checking for fixes is tedious. Does pacman or another Arch tool support a one-version-only skip, or is there a safer way to handle this workflow?
3 Answers
Package downgrades and version blocks are handled more directly by Gentoo’s package manager, including masking particular versions. If this kind of per-version control is a regular requirement, a distribution with that workflow built in may be a better fit. On Arch, however, selectively holding packages is considered unsupported because dependencies can move ahead of the held package.
Before downgrading, check the package’s bug reports and the Arch package archive. For an isolated regression, many users simply keep the known-good package version and wait a few days for a rebuild or fix, then update normally. There is no reliable pacman setting that watches for the next release and clears IgnorePkg for you, so any automation would be local scripting and would need to account for dependency and ABI changes.
Pacman does not have a built-in “skip exactly this version” setting. IgnorePkg is persistent until you remove the entry, and automatically skipping only one release would generally require a custom script or wrapper that checks the available package version. Be careful with that approach, though: holding packages back creates a partial upgrade, which Arch does not support. If a package is known to be broken, the safer short-term option is often to delay the entire system update until the repository version is fixed, rather than updating everything else around it.
The reason for downgrading is that specific releases of BlueZ and linux-firmware-amdgpu were unusable with my hardware. I’m trying to return to normal updates as soon as corrected versions are released, not permanently hold those packages.
That waiting approach is exactly what I’m trying to make less manual. Monitoring upstream release pages and remembering to remove the ignore entry works, but it would be useful to have a straightforward one-version skip.