bug: asdf cannot be downgraded via homebrew

[MihaiOnSoftware]

Describe the Bug

asdf 0.16.0 has a lot of breaking changes which cause other tools in the ecosystem to break. For example RubyMine needs to be manually configured in a painful way. As a result it would be great to be able to downgrade until the rest of the ecosystem around asdf catches up. Considering that homebrew is the primary package manager and in fact one of the recommended ways of installing asdf, it would be ideal to be able to downgrade using it.

Steps to Reproduce

In the terminal run brew install [email protected] to try and install a previous version of asdf

Expected Behaviour

asdf 0.15.0 is installed

Actual Behaviour

==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula.jws.json
==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask.jws.json
Warning: No available formula with the name "[email protected]".
==> Searching for similarly named formulae and casks...
Error: No formulae or casks found for [email protected].

Environment

Homebrew 4.4.20


OS:
Darwin Mihai-Popescu 24.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 24.3.0: Thu Jan  2 20:24:23 PST 2025; root:xnu-11215.81.4~3/RELEASE_ARM64_T6020 arm64

SHELL:
zsh 5.9 (arm64-apple-darwin24.0)

BASH VERSION:
5.2.37(1)-release

ASDF VERSION:
0.16.1

ASDF INTERNAL VARIABLES:
ASDF_DEFAULT_TOOL_VERSIONS_FILENAME=.tool-versions
ASDF_DATA_DIR=/Users/<username>/.asdf
ASDF_CONFIG_FILE=/Users/<username>/.asdfrc

ASDF INSTALLED PLUGINS:
nodejs    https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-nodejs.git 9c4e0f27d760a33fb56c653c632b96d51ac3f8cf
python    https://github.com/danhper/asdf-python.git 5e277e24ec2b6739728f458c1c25eeb2a8b8bb79
ruby      https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-ruby.git   a76d00bb643f3528f31aaee9a7c246c449016419

asdf plugins affected (if relevant)

No response

[guilhermearaujo]

AFAIK you can't choose a version on homebrew, but you can downgrade to 0.15.0 doing this:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/bfbd802015ff065d868032c92e5092109882741b/Formula/a/asdf.rb -o asdf.rb
brew unlink asdf
brew install --formula asdf.rb
brew pin asdf # optional, if you want to avoid upgrading again

[Stratus3D]

@MihaiOnSoftware I'm sorry you had issues with version 0.16.0! It'd be great if Homebrew made it easier to install older versions, but homebrew-core seems to only support one version at a time. Once my PR for 0.16.0 got merged everyone installing/upgrade asdf effectively got forced onto the new version. I'm closing this issue as there isn't anything asdf core maintainers can do to improve this. @guilhermearaujo solution is what I'd recommend for those that want to roll back to previous versions.

[theblang]

@Stratus3D According to their docs, it seems like you can have multiple deployed versions?

[Stratus3D]

@theblang true! I'd welcome a [email protected] version if someone wants to contribute that to homebrew. It should be fairly easy - just checkout the asdf formula prior to the 0.16.0 changes and copy it to an new [email protected] formula.