I had a problem with installing Openshot from the AUR using yay. The compilation seemed to start ok, but soon threw out a number of errors all relating to libopenshot, and then aborted on me saying I needed ‘manual intervention’. Before I started the installation I had carefully removed every file and directory relating to openshot and libopenshot, so believed my system was ‘openshot free’. But it made no difference.
Then I noticed that despite the above, when I did a search for openshot with yay, it showed that libopenshot was still installed. I could not understand how that was possible, given that every trace of openshot I thought had been removed. So next I proceeded with yay -Rns libopenshot,and a further search showed that libopenshot indeed was now removed. So I tried another AUR installment attempt, and this time it was successful with no errors or warnings, and it launches just fine.
So for those who do have compilation issues when installing from the AUR, I’d make sure that every remnant of any previous installation, including dependencies not used by other packages is removed first.
The error details it provided, I think would have pointed to a more specific issue.
When installing something from the AUR, that has already been installed in some way by Arch Linux packaging tools (eg: pacman, makepkg, yay, paru), it’s able to update or replace where needed, provided that doesn’t conflict with the interests of other installed packages, like breaking a dependency.
If using the above mentioned packaging tools, this is generally not necessary, except on such occasions where a major update breaks a dependency chain and sometimes a bit of fiddling is required.
But if you’ve installed applications without using the above mentioned packaging tools, then yes, conflicts can certainly happen. The more accurate rule is, always use Arch Linux packaging tools.
Yes but I installied from yay, which I assume is an Arch packaging tool and which one needs if installing from the AUR anyway. Both makepkg and cmake are already installed on my system, but I don’t recall installing them, so I guess they came with my Endeavour installation.