installing source over package

[Darren Crotchett]

I had an issue with the cups-filters package on Wheezy.  I found that the bug was resolved in the unstable branch.  But, I wasn't sure how to get the unstable branch version of cups.  So, I compiled cups-filters from source and installed it on top of my current version (did not uninstall the package version first).  This fixed my problem.  But, now I'm wondering what the consequences will be and if there was a better way to handle it.

 

My reasoning for leaving the apt pkg installed was because I wanted apt to still upgrade when a new version comes out. 

[Bob Proulx]

The effects depend upon whether you installed files that are also
installed by the package or if you installed additional files that are
not installed by the package. A lot of package management is cleaning
undesirable cruft out of an upstream installation.

I am not saying that cups-filters has files that you would have
installed from source that were not in the package. I don't know.
But if it did and if those files were not part of the installed file
list then those files would hang around forever and never be upgraded
nor cleaned because they are out of the control of the package
manager.

For any files that you did install that are on top of the existing
packaged files then upgrading or reinstalling the package will replace
your files with the package's files. If your local modifications are
just to a subset of the package files then upgrading the package would
completely remove and replace your local modifications.

Bob

[Brian]

On Fri 06 Apr 2012 at 14:08:25 -0500, Darren Crotchett wrote:

> I had an issue with the cups-filters package on Wheezy. I found that the
> bug was resolved in the unstable branch. But, I wasn't sure how to get the
> unstable branch version of cups. So, I compiled cups-filters from source
> and installed it on top of my current version (did not uninstall the
> package version first). This fixed my problem. But, now I'm wondering
> what the consequences will be and if there was a better way to handle it.

You made it hard for yourself. It would have been sufficient to have
downloaded cups-filters from unstable and installed it with 'dpkg -i'.
You could still do this after purging the cups-filters you have.

> My reasoning for leaving the apt pkg installed was because I wanted apt to
> still upgrade when a new version comes out.

The version you install with 'dpkg -i' will still be upgraded if there
is a higher version available.


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[Darren Crotchett]

thanks

[Darren Crotchett]

I wanted to post a follow up to my original question.  I believe I now know the consequences.  It broke the package system. I tried to fix it with dpkg -i suggestion.  But, that failed with the

As far as I can tell, make install installed a non LSB cups script into /etc/init.d/.  The next time I tried to run apt-get dist-upgrade, I received a lot of errors:
<snippage>
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libsane-hpaio hplip-data
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  hplip-data libhpmud0 libsane-hpaio printer-driver-hpijs
Suggested packages:
  hpijs-ppds hplip-doc
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  cups* cups-driver-gutenprint* hplip* printer-driver-gutenprint*
  printer-driver-hpcups*
The following packages will be upgraded:
  hplip-data libhpmud0 libsane-hpaio printer-driver-hpijs
4 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 5 to remove and 649 not upgraded.
211 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/7,640 kB of archives.
After this operation, 7,660 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Setting up initscripts (2.88dsf-22.1) ...
insserv: warning: script 'K36cups' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: warning: script 'cups' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: There is a loop at service minissdpd if started
insserv: Starting cups depends on minissdpd and therefore on system facility `$all' which can not be
 true!
</snippage>

The way that I fixed it was by copying a working copy of the cups script from a Debian VM that I have running.  apt-get worked fine after that.  And after upgrading, printing even works.  So, I guess whatever bug existed in cups-filters is fixed in the current version.