How to upgrade poppler-utils to latest version?

Question

My system has poppler-utils v0.24.5. From the official site I found that the latest version is 0.40.0.

I tried to update it using following command

sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade poppler-utils

but it doesn't upgrade and show following message.

poppler-utils is already the newest version. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 14 not upgraded.

Can anybody please help me to upgrade to latest version?

Solution

This is because Ubuntu focuses on stability, not bleeding edge packages, this means that the software in the repositories can be outdated and you must build it from source yourself.

First remove the current installed version

sudo apt-get purge poppler-utils

Install the required build tools

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall

Run these commands to build and install

wget --directory-prefix=~ poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.40.0.tar.xz
tar -xvzf ~/poppler-0.40.0.tar.xz
cd ~/poppler-0.40.0
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall

Now poppler-0.40.0 is installed on your computer.

Comments

[Admin]

Similarly important as to why apt-get install didn't update the software: Why don't the Ubuntu repositories have the latest versions of software?

[A.B.]

Relevant: askubuntu.com/a/705380/367165

[cl-netbox]

@markkirby : Another useful answer from you ! :)

[ohnoplus]

I think its 'build-essential' rather than 'build-essentials' in the install line, right?

[Mark Kirby]

@ohnoplus Yes it should, well spotted.

[Ansa211]

Currently, the latest version that can be installed on Kubuntu 14.04 without a newer version of cmake is poppler-0.59.0. On my system, the tar command works only without the -z switch.