Bug#606175: libgl1-nvidia-alternatives: nvidia alternatives links keep breaking

[Russ Allbery]

Phil Dibowitz <phil at ipom.com> writes:

> Package: libgl1-nvidia-alternatives
> Version: 195.36.31-6
> Severity: important

> Everytime 'apt-get upgrade' gets run most of my X programs stop being
> able to launch becaue they can't find symbols in libGL. It turns out
> this is because /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 is a link to libGL.so.1.0.5336
> instead of /etc/alternatives/libGL.so.1.

The problem is caused by that file existing at all, and the reason why
this changes after every apt-get upgrade is because ldconfig runs after
shared library changes.  ldconfig is replacing that symlink because it
sees a shared library with the right SONAME in the same directory.

Just deleting /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.0.5336 will solve this problem.  Based
on the file name, this is probably a file left over from a long-ago manual
installation of the NVIDIA drivers using the upstream installer.

It's unfortunately hard for the Debian packages to work around this
directly, since of course deleting files from your system is not a safe
action to take but that's the best solution.  In general, you don't want
to mix the upstream installer and the Debian packages because the Debian
packages need to do various special things about where they put the
libraries to allow proper co-existence with other Debian packages, and
that gets confused when the NVIDIA installer drops files directly into
system directories.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>