Re: LibGL

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 09:47:05AM +0100, Leopold Palomo Avellaneda wrote:
> what does exactly means a diverted file?

dpkg keeps track of all the files belonging to each package.  Sometimes
more than one package wants to provide the same file, which of course
would cause a conflict.  So in that case it is possible for one of the
packages to use dpkg-divert to rename the files in other packages that
conflict so that the package can install the file instead.  The diverted
files will be renamed with something related to the package name
appended to the name.  dpkg then notes this rename/diversion in its file
list for those packages, so that it still knows which files belong to
each package.  This avoids files being overwritten, and it means you
know exactly which package each file belongs to, even in the few cases
where there is a good reason for multiple packages to provide the same
file.

You can see an example of this in /var/lib/dpkg/info/nvidia-glx.preinst
where it diverts a number of files belonging to xlibmesa by having dpkg
rename them to *.xlibmesa before installing the files from nvidia-glx.

It appears the /usr/lib/libGL.so link is actually created by the
/etc/init.d/nvidia-glx startup script, if either libgl1-mesa-dev or
nvidia-glx-dev is installed.  If neither is, then you don't have the
headers for compiling and hence have no need for the symlink at all.
You can always run '/etc/init.d/nvidia-glx restart' to check and update
the links.

--
Len Sorensen