Bug#586984: closed by Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> (Bug#586984: fixed in lintian 2.4.2)

[Raphael Geissert <geissert@debian.org>]

On Tuesday 29 June 2010 17:00:31 you wrote:
> The package diverts three files, one is shipped, one is
> not shipped and the third (a symlink) is created via dpkg triggers.

And that's the key to the problem.

> http://stxxl.ae.cs.uni-frankfurt.de/tmp/ea1deb9d-456a-4b51-9a0f-49a13354a00
> 9/libgl1-nvidia-glx_195.36.31-1~_amd64.deb

preinst diverts the following files:
/usr/lib/$file
/usr/lib/libGL.so.1
/usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2
/usr/lib/libGL.so

Since lintian doesn't know what $file actually means, it replaces it with a 
wildcard (represented by '*' in the output.)
So, when it goes and looks for a file shipped by the package matching 
/usr/lib/* it does find some (any file in /usr/lib counts as a valid match [1].)

There's no bug in lintian then.

By the way, unless I'm missing something, your preinst won't work. It is only 
possible to divert a file once.

[1] Including directories, I think; and that's another bug as dpkg-divert 
doesn't support directories.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net