Background
Sometime if we want to install some old version's formula, for example I was hope to install a old version python with brew.
Basically we can install the latest version of 3.7, for now it is 3.7.16, but what if I want to install 3.7.2?
Here introduce a way to do it.
Extract the old version
First extract the specified version to local, it will show the saved path when extract succeed.
brew extract --version=3.7.2 python homebrew/cask
Install the old version of python
Then we can install the specified version directly.
brew install python@3.7.2
Edit formula if necessary
Sometimes, when we install the old version, it often has some issues, we may need do some fix for the formula, we can use this command to do this.
brew edit python@3.7.2
It will open a editor and let you edit the formula.
By setting the environment variable HOMEBREW_EDITOR to choose the editor for editing. Such as if we use vim for editing we can setup a variable in ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc.
HOMEBREW_EDITOR=vim
Debug formula installation
Sometimes we need to know what error occurred or why the installation failed. We can add -vd options for investigation when install the formula.
brew install -vd python@3.7.2
If we got a error for the installation, it will stop and show some options for debuging. We can choose 5.shell to rerun the last commands and check what happened etc.
BuildError: Failed executing: xxxxxx
1. raise
2. ignore
3. backtrace
4. irb
5. shell