I'm not sure I have a complete answer to this question, but I have a few
things to say. First there are a few ways you may be able to get around
dealing with the issue.
Are you running the current release version of Ubuntu (Breezy Badger) or
the development version (Dapper Drake)? If you're running Breezy you
might try adding the breezy-backports repository, which backports some
popular apps from Dapper. This may alleviate the need to install
non-ubuntu packages. Alternately, if you're not using Dapper, you could
try just upgrading to Dapper in order to have newer stuff. If it's
software you can get in rpm form, you can use alien to obtain a deb. I'm
not sure, you might run into some issues with dependencies trying this
route, but at least apt will know the package is installed.
Now, if you can't sidestep the issue and really want to install something
that you can't get as a working deb, I'm not sure what the best advice is.
I've definitely no expert. I think the "proper" thing to do would be to
simply install the new version in /usr/local. Then you can either
"apt-get remove" the old version or leave it there. I think (but am not
certain) that "apt-get remove" should not remove config files (that's what
the purge option is supposed to do), so that *should* work; however, I
imagine the best thing to do is just leave the old version around and just
use the new version exclusively.
I think installing the apps in the default location (/usr) without doing
"apt-get remove" to the Ubuntu version is probably ill advised. It's
possible that if it's an end-user application (say Firefox) and not a
library or compiler or such then it might not matter too much, because
it's unlikely that all that many packages depend on it. It probably safer
to avoid this, though.
Hope that helps,
Nick
On Tue, 14 Mar 2006, Derek Juba wrote:
I've been runnning Ubuntu on my home PC for a little while now, but I'm
running into the following problem. If I want to install a program myself
(say compiled from source) that's newer than the version in the Ubuntu
binary repository or that is not (yet) in the repository, I'm afraid to
install it behind the package manager's back in the standard locations
since the package manager would then no longer have an accurate picture of
what versions of things I have. I'm currently just installing this kind
of stuff to a programs directory in my home directory, but it seems kind
of silly to have to avoid putting programs in the standard locations. So,
what I want to know is, is there a better way to do this? Do other
distros (say, Gentoo) have this problem as well?
Thanks for any advice.
-Derek
