Downgrade a package in archlinux

Mon 27 October 2014

The situation is the following: I need to downgrade the boost package from the version 1.56 to 1.55. The dedicated page on the arch wiki suggest several solutions. The one I chose is using the AUR package downgrader . Its usage is really intuitive:

downgrader -l  <package_name>

This is an interactive tool. For each package, a simple text menu is
printed with all availables versions for the package. Just choose the
one you want. If the wanted package is not in your cache (
/var/cache/pacman/pkg/ ), it will be donwloaded and put into your
cache.
Note that it can only proceed one package at a time.
For the specific usage, it cannot downgrade both boost-libs and boost
at the same time, and thus return an error. I installed both package
one by one by hand with pacman -U <path_to_package> . I made it
twice, the first one accepting the unresolved dependencies, the second
one checking all is OK.