[pacman-dev] fglrx-utils preferred over libgl-dri

[Xavier]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 07:02:48PM +0200, Mateusz Jedrasik wrote:
> Thursday 27 of September 2007 18:56:37 Xavier napisał(a):
> > Why?
> 
> Well if I understand correctly, supposing I have kdemod-kdebase installed, and 
> some package requires kdebase, it will ignore the fact kdemod-kdebase is 
> there and 'provides='kdebase'' and try and install kdebase from whatever 
> other repo.
> 
> Unless I'm reading you wrong ;-)
> 
> In your case that you mentioned in your previous e-mail (which btw seems like 
> a very chaotic explanation, maybe you can elaborate?) all that's needed to 
> satisfy pacman and not have it pull in fglrx-libs, is to put 'provides=libgl' 
> into libgl-dri.
> 
> That would sort it proper.
> 

It seems you are misunderstanding the issue.

libgl-dri already provides libgl. But how do you choose between the multiple
libgl providers?

When you try to install a package requiring libgl, and you don't have libgl
installed, nor a package providing it, pacman does the following :
- look if a package named libgl is in a repo
- if not, it looks for a provider, looking at each repos one by one (in the
order defined in pacman.conf), at each packages in a repo one by one
(probably in alphabetical order).

What this means is that in any case (whether you are a nvidia, intel,
whatever, user), pacman will pull fglrx-utils for satisfying the libgl
dependency, only because it's the first one it finds.

Currently, the user has to first install the correct libgl provider for his
hardware (either libgl-dri or fglrx-utils or nvidia-utils), before installing
any packages depending on libgl.
Otherwise, if the user let pacman install fglrx-utils on his nvidia hardware,
bad things might happen.

Now, if libgl-dri is renamed to libgl, pacman will choose this package first,
which should result in a saner default for everyone.