How can I add a PPA from a previous release?

Question

I've been trying to get vim with the breakindent patch applied, but it's only available through Quantal, and I'm running Raring. Is there a way to force-install a PPA from a previous release? I tried manually downloading all the packages and running sudo dpkg -i but I get lots of errors about dependencies, some of which don't look like they can be resolved. Am I stuck with having to compile vim myself?

Solution 1

You should choose Modify in Software & Updates > Other software from raring to quantal distribution.

Solution 2

After you add the repository, you can try to change the distribution manually:

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/eudoxos-vim-breakindent-<version>.list 
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/eudoxos/vim-breakindent/ubuntu <version> main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/eudoxos/vim-breakindent/ubuntu <version> main

So just replace <version> on those entries with quantal, and do sudo apt-get update. It is not guaranteed it will work, but if it doesn't you can revert the canges or remove the PPA.

Solution 3

To avoid manual change of the sources list you can use the following command to add the repository for a specific Ubuntu version:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/eudoxos/vim-breakindent/ubuntu <needed_version_here> main"

To remove the added repo:

sudo add-apt-repository -r "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/eudoxos/vim-breakindent/ubuntu <needed_version_here> main"

Comments

[Admin]

How did you add the PPA, with add-apt-repository? Or have you not added it yet?

[Admin]

Adding the PPA works, but since its Raring area is empty, apt-get returns W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/eudoxos/vim-breakindent/ubuntu/dist‌​s/raring/main/binary‌​-amd64/Packages 404 Not Found W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/eudoxos/vim-breakindent/ubuntu/dist‌​s/raring/main/binary‌​-i386/Packages 404 Not Found E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead. Furthermore, adding an empty repo like that breaks apt-get upgrade, so I have to go in and manually remove the PPA entries from my sources list.

[Christopher]

Awesome. That seems to have worked. But then how do I install a version of a package older than the one currently installed?

[Radu Rădeanu]

@Jon I think it will work with sudo apt-get remove --purge [package] and again sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install [package]

[Christopher]

It still seems to install the newer version from the official repos, instead of the older version from the PPA.

[Radu Rădeanu]

If you want to install an old version, you should read this: How to downgrade packages on Ubuntu?

[Christopher]

For some reason, it's not recognizing anything from the quantal repo. Browsing by source in synaptic shows nothing from this PPA.

[Szczepan Hołyszewski]

How to do this with CLI? I need to add an older PPA to a never Ubuntu while building a Docker image!