[arch-dev-public] mesa packaging, libGL handling

Jan de Groot jan at jgc.homeip.net
Fri Feb 15 07:07:01 EST 2013


At this moment our Mesa package is a mess. It contains several split
packages, some even just containing one file. Most of these packages
depend on eachother, so other than "let's make it look like Debian" I
don't see a big need for splitups anymore.

The initial splitup was *-dri due to its size, libgl due to nvidia-utils
replacing it and mesa for the rest of the package. I would propse a
different structure: one single mesa package which doesn't ship
libGL.so.1 and libGL.so symlinks.
These symlinks should be removed from other packages as well and should
get placed in post_install/post_upgrade. In case of nvidia-utils and
catalyst it should replace them, in case of mesa it should only place
them if they don't exist or point to nonexistent files.
On post_remove the symlinks should get removed in case they link to
nonexistent files (mesa) or reverted to libGL.so from mesa if that is
still installed (nvidia, catalyst).

This should make the PKGBUILD a lot more readable and should improve our
situation with (make)dependencies at the cost of some extra
driver/library/header bloatware that gets installed in case you need
libGL for something.
An additional downside of this implementation is that namcap doesn't
know where libGL.so.1 comes from, resulting in "depends on uninstalled
dependency libGL.so.1".

What do other developers think about this approach?




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