Come to find out that the new cut-n-paste handler in Inkscape 0.47 collides mightily with (among other things) Clipman 1.1.3, the xfce4 clipboard manager, as mentioned in bugs 487653 and 418242.
Seeing as how I depend on Clipman, the least-disruptive course of action seems to be downgrading it to 1.1.1, which required some fiddling with the Arch Build System.
I have a build tree set up in /var/abs/local, so…
cd /var/abs/local cp -r /var/abs/extra/xfce4-clipman-plugin/ . cd xfce4-clipman-plugin
The PKGBUILD file tells us that source tarballs are available at
source=(http://archive.xfce.org/src/panel-plugins/${pkgname}/1.1/${pkgname}-${pkgver}.tar.bz2)
md5sums=('2ba70c6bd710e2a18cba5add66d297dc')
Go there, get the md5 sum for the 1.1.1 package, then edit the PKGBUILD to suit:
pkgver=1.1.1
... snippage ...
md5sums=('0884207cabd3a3a94c86b919bbf1617b')
Remove the existing package, build & install the new / old one:
sudo packman -R xfce4-clipman-plugin makepkg -s sudo pacman -U xfce4-clipman-plugin-1.1.1-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
Then edit /etc/pacman.conf to ensure Clipman remains obsolete:
IgnorePkg = xfce4-clipman-plugin
Restart the panels:
xfce4-panel -r
And it seems to work just fine…
Doc for this is pretty good: building custom ABS packages and downgrading packages. The trick was finding the backlevel versions, which stumped me until I dug into the PKGBUILD file.
It’s worth nothing that this conflict isn’t unique to Arch Linux: the same problem is affecting other distros, too. What is unique to Arch is that it’ll distribute the fix earlier than anybody else, too, because as soon as the upstream versions change, they’re in the Arch repositories.
Memo to Self: remember to un-wedge Clipman when Inkscape gets its act together. Fortunately, pacman reports which packages it’s ignoring.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 