The question to ask them at this point is, if it exists, then where is it? Because as shown above it doesn’t exist in ANY of the default RHEL9 repositories.
One more thing to add, I’ll give a small example below to show the difference. You’ll have noticed in my previous post I used the --showduplicates parameter, to see if RHEL9 showed multiple proj packages of which it doesn’t. Now, if I repeat that for say nano:
root@rhel9:~# dnf list nano --showduplicates
Updating Subscription Management repositories.
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:15 ago on Thu 11 Dec 2025 10:56:43 AM CET.
Installed Packages
nano.x86_64 5.6.1-7.el9 @rhel-9-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms
Available Packages
nano.x86_64 5.6.1-5.el9 rhel-9-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms
nano.x86_64 5.6.1-6.el9 rhel-9-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms
nano.x86_64 5.6.1-7.el9 rhel-9-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms
as you can see, we can choose a previous version. Had a previous version of proj been available in RHEL9, we’d have been able to install it, be it the version from 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 or whatever. Unfortunately that is not the case, so if proj does exist as an older version then the question is in which repository? Because it doesn’t appear in the main repositories for the distribution.
Now, let’s repeat the same nano example on Rocky9.
root@rocky9:~# dnf list --showduplicates nano
Last metadata expiration check: 0:02:12 ago on Thu 11 Dec 2025 10:55:32 AM CET.
Installed Packages
nano.x86_64 5.6.1-7.el9 @baseos
Available Packages
nano.x86_64 5.6.1-7.el9 baseos
as you can see here, it’s only showing the latest. And there is a big reason for this. With Rocky, only the latest release is supported, so you will only see packages available in the current version. Therefore, the --showduplicates command will not help if older packages are available. Rocky only supports the latest release. This means, once a new release is available, like 9.7 then this is the only one supported. Sure, you can stay on Rocky 9.0 or whatever if you want, but then any packages you install later will become a mix of 9.0 and 9.7 packages which would also be an unsupported scenario.
Rocky doesn’t support version pinning either, so if that is something you need then your real option is to pay and use RHEL9 instead. But irrespective of this, if someone is making an rpm for a Linux distribution, then they should be ensuring that they keep it up-to-date and provide new versions that utilise the newer packages when a system is updated. They cannot lock it to an old package version, or expect people to downgrade packages just to use their rpm.
