How do I install an older version of GNU make using apt on Ubuntu 16.04?

Question

The installed version is 4.1 and need to downgrade to 3.81. I searched apt for make 3.81, but I couldn't find it.

Answer 1

Rather than downgrading packages in your normal system, I'd strongly suggest handling this kind of thing using a chroot or a container. Those allow you to keep whatever you need to build a particular bit of software in its own semi-isolated environment so that it doesn't conflict with anything else.

You can use schroot to manage chroots in such a way that they can access files in your home directory, which is convenient for ad-hoc development like this (for example, the Ubuntu SimpleSbuild wiki page explains how to set this up; you don't need sbuild itself, but mk-sbuild and sbuild-update are convenient ways to create and manage chroots.

Alternatively, recent versions of Ubuntu come with LXD, which is very handy for this kind of thing. Stéphane's series of blog posts is a good place to start, but basically you can do:

sudo apt install lxd
sudo lxd init
sudo adduser $USER lxd

... then either restart your user session or use newgrp lxd, then:

lxc launch ubuntu:14.04 android-build
lxc exec android-build bash

... and you're off to the races. If you want to give the container access to your home directory, that's a bit more fiddly due to user namespacing, but possible.

Answer 2

You could add the sources.list lines for 14.04 to your sources.list file then use apt update; apt install -t=trusty make