Is there a safe way to download and install packages without messing up aptitude?
Aptitude (and apt-get as well as yum on CentOS) is not magic. It’s a package installer that installs software components into predetermined areas based on a software package’s needs.
When you say you want to download the development branch from their Git repository, what you are basically attempting to do is to compile from source code. Which technically means you might be able to set a different directory prefix via configure but looking at the source code it seems like their instructions are to simply do a git clone, checkout the develop branch, then do a make and sudo make install. Which seems to forgo the whole configure stage that happens before make.
Which means my gut says installing the latest/stable production version while having the developer version running on the same machine is just not possible.
But that said, depending on how deeply you have ensconced yourself in the production version, you could just start “tabula rasa” and purge the installed package like this:
sudo aptitude purge zathura Which would effectively “purge” your system of all traces of Zathura that was installed via Aptitude. Then install the developer version from source to see what is what.
And when you are done with that developer version, it seems like their source code install allows for a clean uninstall via this command:
sudo make uninstall And that’s nice if it works. But the best approach I use for cases like this is to run a developer “sandbox” in a virtual environment like VirtualBox. So yes, you might have to run Ubuntu within a VirtualBox on an Ubuntu install, but it does allow you the luxury of experimenting & blowing up new things with little real risk.
Experimenting side-by-side with source code is on a machine with production code installed is a recipe for disaster unless there is a clear uninstall recipe in place.