dpkg-divert local redirection of bins in Ubuntu
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It seems sometimes you get a new package from somewhere and its just an update for an older package but from a different author, or a slightly different functioning bin. The dpkg-divert command allows you to replace a binary installed upon the system, and have this replacement persist even if you upgrade packages. One common reason to do this is if you’re using a mailserver such as qmail, and you wish to replace the file /usr/lib/sendmail with the version from that package. In this case making a diversion is a good solution. Well you can locally divert how you refer to the bin and make dpkg aware of this via the following command :
dpkg-divert --local --divert /usr/bin/sumguy --rename --add /usr/bin/sumguy-longer-name-newer-package
In this case our package provides sumguy-longer-name-newer-package as the binary and hence the command, but thats a LOT to type 🙁 we just want to call it by its simpler name of
so we use the above divert command and voila! we are good to go.
