Bug#172546: dpkg: issues with diversions and symlinks

[Tuukka Hastrup <hastrup@itu.st.jyu.fi>]

On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> Package: dpkg
> Version: 1.10.9
> Severity: normal

Same problem with version 1.10.10. This is severe, because it's easy to 
miss the reason.

> In my DRI CVS snapshot packages, I'd like to divert libGL from xlibmesa3. I
> expected that to be a simple matter of diverting
> /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2, but the result was this:
> 
> lrwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           24 2002-12-07 10:54 /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1 -> libGL.so.1.2.nodri-trunk
> - -rw-r--r--    1 root     root       805452 2002-12-05 20:55 /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2
> - -rw-r--r--    1 root     root       491608 2002-11-23 09:05 /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2.nodri-trunk

I installed ATI's driver package (fglrx-glc22), and similarily needed to
divert /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2 from xlibmesa3-gl. dpkg-divert moved it 
to /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2.distrib.

All would be well, but when ldconfig updates symlinks, it decides that the
diverted libGL.so.1.2.distrib is a better libGL.so.1 than the wanted
libGL.so.1.2. This means all programs still use the library from
xlibmesa3-gl.

dpkg-divert could fix this by diverting libraries to some other name than
original + ".divert" by default. To fix ldconfig instead, I think the
so-library naming scheme would have to be changed so that no .divert file
could be considered a library version.

> Any ideas how to fix or at least work around this appreciated.

Maybe you solved this problem a long time ago already, but here's for the 
record.

The administrator can already use dpkg-divert option --divert to specify
some name that doesn't infere with ldconfig logic. Additionally, a package
mainainer can, instead of diverting the old library file, give their
version of the file a name that ldconfig considers better than the 
original.


Yours,
Tuukka Hastrup

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