How to tell which version of a application is running

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 16 Apr 2017 14:51:51 +0200, Xen wrote:
>Xen schreef op 16-04-2017 14:44:
>
>> # mv /usr/bin/tracker{,.backup}
>> # ln -s /usr/local/bin/tracker /usr/bin/  
>
>Also, after that:
>
># apt-mark hold tracker
>
>To prevent this symlink from being overwritten on package updates.

A few days back you mentioned that customisation using Ubuntu is as easy
as for Arch and now you are giving a bad advice, that even isn't required
using Ubuntu.

If you hold a package, you could run into issues, if a new version should
be required by an update.

Instead simply ensure that each time an upgrade wants to install
/usr/bin/tracker, it instead installs it as /usr/bin/tracker.backup by
running

sudo dpkg-divert --add --rename --divert /usr/bin/tracker.backup /usr/bin/tracker

Btw. I don't understand such a dirty hack, to install a package and
seemingly another version to /usr/local without a package. Ok, one reason
could be to provide tracker libs, for packages from official repositories,
a pitfall for a release model distro, but not for a rolling release such as
Arch Linux.

If the OP should be unable to build Ubuntu packages, the OP should consider
to test if automatically building a package using "checkinstall" does the job.

However,regarding soname issues that are required by tracker, the OP has
to rebuild the version in /usr/local manually, if it's required.

Apart from this, what is true for /usr/bin/ vs /usr/local/bin, is true for
the libs as well, so to not break apps from official repositories, keeping
the libs of official repositories is required, so maybe keeping the original
package and the new version in parallel is a good idea.

Happy customising ;).