If an upgrade does not suit you, you can roll back to a specific earlier version and hold it there. Binions is installed and upgraded with apt, so a downgrade is simply asking apt to install a named earlier version of a package and then pinning it so it will not move again. There is no separate “undo upgrade” tool — version pinning is the mechanism.
Take a backup first. Rolling the packages back does not roll your data back. A newer release may already have advanced your database state, so take a fresh backup before you downgrade — see Backup before upgrade.
Pick the version you want to return to, install it explicitly with =<version>, then place a hold so a later apt upgrade cannot move it forward again:
sudo apt install binions-<name>=<previous-version>
sudo apt-mark hold binions-<name>The hold is what keeps the package on the version you chose. While a package is held, routine upgrades skip it; everything else on the host upgrades as normal. You can confirm what is currently held at any time:
apt-mark showholdWhen you are ready to let the package follow releases again — for example once the issue that prompted the rollback is fixed in a newer release — release the hold and upgrade:
sudo apt-mark unhold binions-<name>
sudo apt update
sudo apt install --only-upgrade binions-<name>Keep the set on one version. The whole platform ships at a single version number — all the daemons are built and tested together. If you pin one package back, plan to bring the others to the same version so the set stays consistent.
How far you can safely move depends on whether you stay inside the same major version or cross a major boundary downward.
| Direction | Supported? | Why |
|---|---|---|
Down within the same major (e.g. 1.4.x → 1.2.x) | Normally safe | Releases inside a major are additive and backward-compatible — minors add features, patches fix bugs, and nothing existing is removed. |
Down across a major boundary (e.g. 2.x → 1.x) | Not supported | A new major carries breaking changes and a different licence and feature surface; there is no path back across it. |
Because everything inside a major line is built to be backward-compatible, returning to an earlier release in the same major is the normal, supported case. Crossing a major downward is a different story: the data and configuration shape can differ between majors, the licence covers one major, and the platform does not provide a way to walk that back. Treat a major upgrade as a one-way step — rely on your backups, not on a downgrade, if you need to recover from it. (The upgrade direction across a major is itself guarded; see the Major-version gate.)
Binions does not keep a snapshot of the previous install that it can restore for you. The only built-in way to return to an earlier release is the version-pin procedure above, and the only way to recover earlier data is from a backup you took. Two habits make rollbacks painless: