Priorities of alternatives; was Re: Re (2): xmonad and LXDE.

[peasthope@shaw.ca]

man update-alternatives has no mention of how the priorities of 
alternatives originate.  The most reasonable explanation I can 
imagine is that any new alternative is assigned a lower priority 
than extant alternatives.  Correct?

My example from last July.
peter@dalton:~$ update-alternatives --display x-window-manager
x-window-manager - auto mode
  link currently points to /usr/bin/openbox
/usr/bin/openbox - priority 90
  slave x-window-manager.1.gz: /usr/share/man/man1/openbox.1.gz
/usr/bin/xmonad - priority 20
Current 'best' version is '/usr/bin/openbox'.

Suppose that I prefer xmonad to openbox.  

One way to indulge my prefence would be to somehow impose 
it in the operation of startx.  Apparently this is the effect 
of the first instruction in http://wiki.debian.org/Xmonad,
"... add 
STARTUP=x-window-manager
to your ~/.xsessionrc."

A second strategy would be to find a way to raise the priority 
of xmonad.  If my original speculation above is correct, this 
might be achieved by de-installing both alternatives and 
reinstalling in the desired order.  Alternatively, by using 
update-alternatives directly.

update-alternatives --remove x-window-manager /usr/bin/xmonad
update-alternatives --install x-window-manager x-window-manager /usr/bin/xmonad 100

This would give xmonad top priority system wide and should work 
for a display manager as well as for startx.  Comments welcome.

            ... Peter E.
            

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