Re: installing two versions of a user application
On Fri, 23 Apr 2021 17:22:48 +0100
Morgan Read <read.morgan@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Folks,
>
> Some little time ago I made a jump from another distro into Debian.
>
> When I made that jump I took with me a few proprietary applications that
> I make a lot of use of. One in particular is causing me a bit of a
> headache - Master PDF Editor by Code Industry:
> https://code-industry.net/free-pdf-editor/
>
> Master PDF Editor is now well into version 5, but when it transitioned
> from v4 to v5 it left a lot of its functionality (in the no cost
> version) behind. So, I'd always kept a copy of the old v4 rpm to hand
> and installed alongside v5 in my old distro. Version 4 has long since
> become unavailable, but I was able to make good use of alien to magic my
> v4 rpm into a v4 deb.
>
> BUT, now I can not install both v4 and v5 alongside one another. When I
> install v4, v5 is removed; when I install v5, v4 is removed. This
> wasn't a problem under the old distro. Each version is installed into
> its own directory, either: /opt/master-pdf-editor-4 or
> /opt/master-pdf-editor-5.
>
> I tried to force it with the following, but...
> $ sudo apt install ./master-pdf-editor-4.3.89_qt5.x86_64.deb
> ./master-pdf-editor-5.7.08-qt5_included.x86_64.deb
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree
> Reading state information... Done
> Note, selecting 'master-pdf-editor' instead of
> './master-pdf-editor-4.3.89_qt5.x86_64.deb'
> Note, selecting 'master-pdf-editor' instead of
> './master-pdf-editor-5.7.08-qt5_included.x86_64.deb'
> master-pdf-editor is already the newest version (4.3.89-2).
> The following packages will be upgraded:
> master-pdf-editor
> 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
> Need to get 0 B/28.4 MB of archives.
> After this operation, 64.8 MB of additional disk space will be used.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
> Abort.
>
> Is there any method to allow v4 and v5 to be both installed together?
I'll defer to those with a better understanding of the debian packaging
system internals, and it may depend on the details of the package, but
I'm pretty sure that there's no general way to direct dpkg to install a
package to a location other than the one specified by the package. If
the original packages were installable to separate directories, then it
should be possible to modify the debian packages to work that way as
well, but that's well above my pay grade.
This does seem like a pretty good use case for containerization or
virtualization. LXC (or some sort of chroot solution) in particular
might be a good fit here - you get a separate filesystem, without the
overhead of a full VM, which shouldn't be necessary in this case.
Celejar
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