What were you trying to do that didn't work?

Downgrade a packages for debugging issues in our bootc VMs. We need a persistent downgrade while maintaining the rest as-is because our tests also check lifecycle operations of the VM like reboot, destroy-start, shutdown-start.

What is the impact of this issue to you?

I can't determine on my system if an issue was introduced due to a specific package version update.

Please provide the package NVR for which the bug is seen:

bootc-1.4.0-1.el9.x86_64
rpm-ostree-2025.9-1.el9.x86_64
ostree-2025.4-1.el9.x86_64

How reproducible is this bug?:

100%

Steps to reproduce

1. Download the previous package versions, e.g. all cockpit packages from BaseOS onto the VM into a folder

2. cd /var/opt/older_version/cockpit
   rpm-ostree override replace ./*

   systemctl reboot

Expected results

The rpm-ostree confirms changes were staged and requests to reboot.
After the reboot,

rpm -q <package_name>

confirms that the package was downgraded.

Actual results

The rpm-ostree confirms changes were staged and requests to reboot. and there are no error messages during boot. However, the package version remains the same.

Additional information

1. This doesn't reproduce on RHEL 10.1, where the package versions are the same.