You can see what this package does by looking at the source code at https://salsa.debian.org/debian/matlab-support
It:
- Creates an application menu for MATLAB (i.e. in your KDE/Gnome/MATE menus)
- Using the Debian alternatives system, creates symlinks for various components in /usr/bin (e.g. /usr/bin/matlab, /usr/bin/matlab-mex, ...)
- MATLAB ships with quite a few shared libraries, however your Linux system will already have those. So the package renames the MATLAB provided ones (by adding .bak to their file name). This then forces MATLAB to use the system provided libraries instead. This is good because those libraries are regularly maintained and updated by your distributions package manager.
Although highly unlikely, switching to the system libraries could lead to problems as MATLAB might have shipped with a slightly different version of those libraries. If MATLAB calls a function that is defined differentely in these two versions then there could be a problem. However this is highly unlikely as these libraries (e.g. libstdc++) are very mature and so have a very stable and well-defined ABI that don't change across minor versions.
Here is the list of libraries:
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnx86/libgcc_s.so.1
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnx86/libstdc++.so.6
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnx86/libgfortran.so.5
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnx86/libquadmath.so.0
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnxa64/libgcc_s.so.1
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnxa64/libstdc++.so.6
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnxa64/libgfortran.so.5
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnxa64/libquadmath.so.0
$matlab_path/bin/glnxa64/libvulkan.so.1
$matlab_path/bin/glnxa64/libfreetype.so.6
