How to update GPSd by building from source

Introduction

I was recently made aware of a bug in GPSd that will result in the time/date jumping backwards 1024 weeks, from October 16, 2021 to Sunday March 3, 2002 for versions 3.20, 3.21, and 3.22. GPSd version 3.22 is currently scheduled to ship with Debian Bullseye, which will be a problem. I use GPSd for my timekeeping interfaces between the source GPS and NTP/Chrony. GPSd version 3.17 is present in the current Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian) images (based off Debian 9 – Stretch) as well.

Fortunately, it isn’t hard to update to your desired version!

Updating GPSd

The overview for updating GPSd is as follows:

• Download the desired release with wget (look for >3.23)
• Uncompress the archive
• Use scons to build the new binaries
• Use scons to install the new binaries

So with that out of the way, let’s get started. (The full install script is at the bottom if you just want to jump ahead to that).

You must first ensure you have the required packages to actually build GPSd from source:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y scons libncurses-dev python-dev pps-tools git-core asciidoctor python3-matplotlib build-essential manpages-dev pkg-config python3-distutils

Next, we will download the desired version of GPSd. In this case, we will be updating GPSd to version 3.23.1. A full list of the releases can be found here.

wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/gpsd/gpsd-3.23.1.tar.gz

Extract the files from the .tar.gz archive, and change to the created folder:

tar -xzf gpsd-3.23.1.tar.gz
cd gpsd-3.23.1/

Now we can build the binaries, which will take a few minutes to run:

sudo scons

# some sources say to do a config=force for scons, I found this wasn't necessary
# if you want to use this force argument, below is the required command
# sudo scons --config=force

Last up is to actually install the binaries:

sudo scons install

And with that, you should now have an updated GPSd running version 3.23.1! I rebooted for good measure with sudo reboot.

If you’re interested in a full script to do all this, check this out:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y scons libncurses-dev python-dev pps-tools git-core asciidoctor python3-matplotlib build-essential manpages-dev pkg-config python3-distutils
wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/gpsd/gpsd-3.23.1.tar.gz
tar -xzf gpsd-3.23.1.tar.gz
cd gpsd-3.23.1
sudo scons
sudo scons install
gpsd -V

Verifying you have the update for GPSd

gpsd -V

References/Sources

• The always helpful and informative satsignal.eu – https://www.satsignal.eu/raspberry-pi/UpdatingGPSD.html
• Official GPSd docs – https://gpsd.gitlab.io/gpsd/building.html