[kwlug-disc] Xubuntu Thunar archive plugin bug / understanding compiling

[Charles M]

This is a bit long winded, but hoping to understand how best to fix
this problem.

There is a bug (of sorts) in Xubuntu 20.04 and Linux Mint 20.1 XFCE
involving the thunar-archive-plugin.

The bug is this: when you right click on most files in Thunar one of
the options is 'create archive.' 'create archive' appears if you right
click on most files, but not for LibreOffice documents.

While LibreOffice documents are a type of archive (if you right click
and open them with Engrampa you'll see the various parts making up an
.odt file) right clicking and choosing 'create archive' on a
LibreOffice file in the Fedora 33 XFCE spin does work. I checked Linux
Mint XFCE 20.1 and it has the same behaviour as Xubuntu (which makes
sense since they probably share the same code base). I haven't checked
Debian yet (wondering if someone running the latest version of Debian
and has LibreOffice installed can confirm this on Debian?).

There is a bug report on gitlab for this issue that was created about
1 year ago here (and a patch):
https://gitlab.xfce.org/thunar-plugins/thunar-archive-plugin/-/commit/fa3ad98d904909267501c0dd05e423bd7873835d

Since the source code isn't installed on the computers I'm trying to
patch I thought I'd try cloning the thunar-archive-plugin repository
and making the plugin (with the hope it would patch the issue on the
Xubuntu system). Here are the steps I took (both git and
build-essential are installed on the systems):

sudo apt install xfce4-dev-tools libthunarx-3-dev libexo-2-dev
git clone https://gitlab.xfce.org/thunar-plugins/thunar-archive-plugin.git
cd thunar-archive-plugin/
./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

Make and make install appear to have worked, but the plugin still
doesn't appear to show 'create archive' when I right click on an .odt
file.

I looked into the thunar-archive-plugin directory and found that the
config.log shows thunar-archive-plugin 0.4.0git-5a58aa0. This
numbering appears to be older than the installed package:

dpkg -l | grep thunar-archive

Which shows 0.4.0-2. I'm guessing it's just Canonical's point release
that's actually older. Does the version I compiled not overwrite the
existing one? How can I tell? I know with apt I can look at
/var/log/apt, but I compiled this from source.

Thanks,

Charles
-- 
Charles
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