Arch Linux

LeftyAce

Member

Registered: 2012-08-18

Posts: 159

[Solved] Installing a program from source that conflicts with pacman

Hi all,

I am trying to update my version of exiv2 (provides exif interpretation for images, including recognizing the lens used). The version of exiv2 in the repos (0.25-3) doesn't support the lens I'm using, but the current development snapshot does.

I managed to download and install it from source, but now I have two versions of exiv2 floating around. The version installed via pacman is in /usr/bin, and the version I want is in /usr/local/bin.

What is the correct way to handle this situation? I tried uninstalling exiv2 via pacman, but I have other things installed that depend on it, so that failed. An ugly idea I had was to just replace the old exiv2 binary with a link to the new one. Any reason not to do that? I'm ok if it gets clobbered by the next update from the repos, since I believe that update will have the support I want.

Thanks in advance!

ps, exiv2 will release its next stable version in 3 months, so I'm guessing the main arch repos will get that version., at which point I can go back to using the version installed through pacman.

Last edited by LeftyAce (2016-03-23 15:24:15)

Ziusudra

Member

Registered: 2014-04-19

Posts: 120

Re: [Solved] Installing a program from source that conflicts with pacman

Take the official exiv2 PKGBUILD and modify it to use the source you want. The use that to make a package for pacman to install replacing the current version.

mpan

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 1,217

Website

Re: [Solved] Installing a program from source that conflicts with pacman

Why do you intend to remove the pacman-managed version? They shouldn’t conflict: just set your PATH to include /usr/local/bin before /usr/bin, or reference the custom exiv2 expicitly. However, if possible, I would just replace the old one with your custom one and then wait until it’s bumped in the official repos.

If you really need to, you can use provides in PKGBUILD, or see if ./configure doesn’t let you set prefix/suffix for names of the binaries.

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Sometimes I seem a bit harsh — don’t get offended too easily!

LeftyAce

Member

Registered: 2012-08-18

Posts: 159

Re: [Solved] Installing a program from source that conflicts with pacman

Ziusudra: that worked great, thank you! Now I'm pretty confident that everything is installed where pacman expects it (when I try to install exiv2 through pacman it warns me I'm about to downgrade). I think now once exiv2 gets updated in the main repos it will just replace my temporary install.

mpan: It turns out I didn't need the exiv2 binary to be updated, I needed all the exiv2 libraries to update as well. The photo processing software I'm using (darktable) doesn't call that binary, rather darktable has to be built against the correct exiv2 libraries, so I needed the whole package installed and I needed to be sure that darktable would find the correct version at compile time. Removing the old version and replacing it might have been overkill, but it ended up working :-)

Note: my initial attempt at this (not using the PKGBUILD) resulted in me having two parallel installations of exiv2. Not good. The pkgbuild approach meant that my version of exiv2 got overwritten, but it also meant that the only thing I need to do to go back to the official release version is downgrade in pacman, which for me seems much cleaner/safer.