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

[Nagy Gabor]

> 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.

Right.

But renaming libgl-dri to libgl is not a real solution neither, but that is much
better than current situation. If I have an ATI card, I want to install fglrx-utils.
We mentioned some possible solutions here:
-let user choose (best solution IMHO, but it may need too many user interactions)
-http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2007-July/008816.html
-packagers can use many conflicts to force pacman to choose a non-conflicting
package (in this example this doesn't help, but in the previous kernel-example,
this might help: nvidia-beyond conflicts with vanilla kernel ... (however, these
packages shouldn't conflict with each other by the "real" definition of
conflicting.)): this won't help yet, see sync402/403.

Bye, ngaba


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