How do I get pacman to use my custom PKGBUILDs when updating?

Question

I customized a PKGBUILD for Apache, ran makepkg and installed it with pacman -U httpd.tar.xz, which worked fine. A few months later I upgraded my system with pacman -Syu which used the system-default configuration for Apache which broke my web server. How do I tell pacman to always use my custom compilation settings so I don’t have to manually upgrade every time a new version is released?

Answer 1

Pacman won't upgrade Apache using your customized PKGBUILD; you will have to do that manually using ABS. What you can do, is prevent pacman from overwriting your customized package.

To expand on Renan's answer, if you have more than one package that you wish to prevent pacman updating, you can include a groups field in the respective PKGBUILDs and then, in /etc/pacman.conf use the IgnoreGroup line.

This gives you a little more control for multiple packages, without having to remember to edit pacman.conf as you add and remove custom PKGBUILDs.

As an example, in your PKGBUILDs, you could use:

groups=('modified')

and in /etc/pacman.conf:

IgnoreGroup = modified

Answer 2

You can edit /etc/pacman.conf and add the name of your package to the IgnorePkg line. That way, pacman will not touch your package upon upgrading.

Answer 3

I solved this by installing yaourt and customizepkg, which allows me to have the best of both worlds: the latest and greatest versions from the official repositories, automatically patched to my specific needs.