How to tell which version of a application is running

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

I guess the easiest dirty hack would be to uninstall the local build
and to keep the original "tracker" packages from the Ubuntu
repositories.

Then the OP could build a new local version again, but now by
configuring with

./configure --prefix=/usr --libexecdir=/usr/lib/tracker

seemingly done by
https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/t/tracker/rules-1.10.5-1 ,
too. Maybe this does overwrite the existing files. This doesn't protect
against upgrades, but at least it's not such a complicated hack as
purging the package(s) might cause.

I recommend to backup the install, before doing this, just in case
"--prefix=/usr --libexecdir=/usr/lib/tracker" shouldn't do the job. I
didn't check the whole Debian/Ubuntu package ;).

On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 09:42:01 +1000, Karl Auer wrote:
>- run "sudo apt-get purge tracker"

In theory this would be the easiest solution. But could it be done?

Take a look at the reverse dependencies:

[root at moonstudio ~]# apt-cache rdepends tracker | sort -ru
tracker
Reverse Depends:
  ubuntu-gnome-desktop
  tracker-miner-fs
  tracker-gui
  tracker-extract
  tracker-dbg
  shared-mime-info
  rygel-tracker
  nautilus
  gnome-photos
  gnome-music
  gnome-documents
  gnome-boxes
  cardapio
  bijiben

Is one of the above packages installed?

It's a hard dependency for e.g.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial-updates/ubuntu-gnome-desktop

Is one of the below packages installed? If so, is a reverse dependency
of those packages installed?

"tracker" is split to:

    gir1.2-tracker-1.0
    libtracker-control-1.0-0
    libtracker-control-1.0-dev
    libtracker-control-doc
    libtracker-miner-1.0-0
    libtracker-miner-1.0-dev
    libtracker-miner-doc
    libtracker-sparql-1.0-0
    libtracker-sparql-1.0-dev
    libtracker-sparql-doc
    tracker
    tracker-extract
    tracker-gui
    tracker-miner-fs

see https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/tracker .
The OP needs to take a look, which of those packages are installed.
Then the OP needs to run

  apt-cache rdepends <package_name> | sort -ru

for each of the installed packages and to check if anything installed
depends on one of those packages. If so, the OP needs to build an empty
dummy package for each of those packages that are already installed,
using equivs,
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ch-helpers.en.html . To be
absolutely safe, the OP should build a dummy package for all packages,
since someday a new installed package might depend on a package that
isn't instealled now.

IOW either the OP has good luck and purging all tracker related
packages is possible, or the OP installs 14 empty dummy packages.

Or else the OP gives up any dirty hack, downloads the Ubuntu source
package, replaces the upstream source with the newer version and builds
all packages the regular Debian/Ubuntu way.

Regards,
Ralf