[Pkg-opencl-devel] Alternatives system for libOpenCL?

[Vincent Danjean]

Le 25/07/2016 à 12:13, Giuseppe Bilotta a écrit :
> The question is whether or not we should allow installing multiple ICD
> loaders, using something like the alternatives system to switch
> between them without having to de/reinstall them when switching.

  Using alternatives means cooperating packages, so it is useless
for the Intel provided ones.
  Using diversion might works, but probably not with the Intel
package. Indeed, from what I read here, it seems that the Intel
package modifies (probably in its postinst) the existing symlinks
(if the symlinks were directly in the package, dpkg would probably
refuse to install the package without the --allow-override switch),
so dpkg (that handles diversions) wont be able to do anything.

  So, I'm very dubious about introducing a fragile setup (be it
alternatives or diversion) in Debian, just to workaround a very
buggy external package.


  Looking at the previous messages in this thread, I see:

> The Intel-distributed blob comes in three packages, a -base with
> libOpenCL.so.2.0 (plus symlinks, plus the alternatives), and the
> -intel-cpu packaged with the CPU ICD

  Did Intel bumped the soname? For what reason? If this is the case,
we might want to have a ocl-icd-libopencl2 that install nearly the
same library as ocl-icd-libopencl1 (but with a bumped SONAME) in order
to be able to run programs compiled with the Intel libopencl.so
(if so, we might want to put this package in contrib instead of main).

  Regards,
    Vincent