ralph.ronnquist wrote:

No I meant to mount an overlay of your current OS, and then install in the overlay.

In that way your lower / installation is unaffected by whatever the inscape installation from daedalus pulls in.

EDIT: change "upper" to "lower" (as it should be)

Oh, I get it now, sorry, yes that would indeed work, and be a bit less effort. This looks like a nice hack for future use.

Meanwhile, I was first trying pdfarrange - which kind of does work, except it is rather crude, and seems to only allow splitting a page vertically in the middle.
Then I saved the document as EPS and tried the original poster (which I guess pdfposter is supposed to imitate or at least is inspired from, but poster only works with EPS). This actually worked perfectly.

poster -mA4 -s1  calypso_path.eps >poster-calypso.eps

yields a file of A4 pages with nice margins and cut marks, just what I needed. I suspect that must have been the same tool I used decades ago.  Now I just need to uninstall pdfposter, PosteRazor and pdfarrange, and remember to never install them again...

I don't understand why you don't just install the flathub version of Inkscape?
It's updated to 1.2.2 there

su
apt install flatpak
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub org.inkscape.Inkscape

https://flatpak.org/setup/Debian
https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.inkscape.Inkscape

No I meant to mount an overlay of your current OS, and then install in the overlay.

In that way your lower / installation is unaffected by whatever the inscape installation from daedalus pulls in.

EDIT: change "upper" to "lower" (as it should be)

Oh, I get it now, sorry, yes that would indeed work, and be a bit less effort. This looks like a nice hack for future use.

Meanwhile, I was first trying pdfarrange - which kind of does work, except it is rather crude, and seems to only allow splitting a page vertically in the middle.
Then I saved the document as EPS and tried the original poster (which I guess pdfposter is supposed to imitate or at least is inspired from, but poster only works with EPS). This actually worked perfectly.

poster -mA4 -s1  calypso_path.eps >poster-calypso.eps

yields a file of A4 pages with nice margins and cut marks, just what I needed. I suspect that must have been the same tool I used decades ago.  Now I just need to uninstall pdfposter, PosteRazor and pdfarrange, and remember to never install them again...

# mkdir /X/{U,W,R}
# mount -t overlay -olowerdir=/,upperdir=/X/U,workdir=/X/W oly /X/R
# chroot /X/R
# echo "deb http://deb/devuan.org/merged daedalus main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# cat <<EOF >> /etc/apt/preferences.d/reluctant-daedalus
Package: *
Pin: release n=daedalus*
Pin-Priority: 90
EOF
# apt-get update
# apt-get install incscape -t daedalus

And then run it there... you will need to sort out authorization for X of course, and you may want to also bind-mount lower /home onto /X/R/home. I'm sure you'll work that out.

In that way your lower / installation is unaffected by whatever the inkscape installation from daedalus pulls in.

EDIT: change "upper" to "lower" (as it should be)

1.2.2 seems available on daedalus and ceres

Well, that doesn't sound like a particular good way to do it, installing a whole unstable OS on another machine or a VM, and then also doing extra tricks to prevent other problems. Then I could just as well install a VM with NetBSD, as it seems pkgsrc has Inkscape 1.2.2 already. I was hoping for an easier solution, for something that should really not be a problem, or at worst a trivial one. It is a bit like if I said the sprinkler on my car isn't working, and the proposed solution was to replace the gas engine with a diesel and repaint the car orange.

I vaguely remember now, having had to solve this problem before, more than a decade ago; I think the solution was some package like pdfposter or PosteRazor, but not one of them. Possibly it was poster and I did the exercise in PostScript and not PDF. I'll give that a try for now, but better suggestions will be warmly welcomed.

How do I install 1.2.2 on my system?