On Sun, Oct 31, 1999 at 10:55:34AM +0100, Roland Rosenfeld wrote: > On Sun, 31 Oct 1999, Branden Robinson wrote: > The disadvantage of the alternative concept over some sensible-xterm > shell script is, that alternatives are static for all users, while > sensible-xterm could be used on a per-user basis (with > x-terminal-emulator as the fall back). Is there any particular reason why the alternatives mechanism couldn't simply be fixed so users can select their own alternatives? For example, instead of having a symlink to the real /usr/bin/foo-1.2 in /etc/alternatives/foo, have an automagically generated script that looks something like: #!/bin/sh prog=`basename $1` if [ "$HOME" && -e "$HOME/.alternatives/$prog ]; then exec $HOME/.alternatives/$prog fi exec /usr/bin/foo-1.2 Or have it debconf-ized, and make it look more like: #!/bin/sh . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule.sh prog=`basename $1` if db_get "alternatives/$prog"; then exec $RET fi Or add a separate indirection, so /usr/bin/foo -> /etc/alternatives/bins/foo /etc/alternatives/bin/foo is a script that defaults to /etc/alternatives/foo /etc/alternatives/foo -> /usr/bin/foo-1.2 or similar, so you can still cat /etc/alternatives/foo to look at the system default. (Of course, you'd only want to do this for exectuables. Manpages and whatnot would still have to make do with a symlink) OTOH, you could just encourage your users to do something like: mkdir ~/bin ln -s /usr/bin/rxvt ~/bin/xterm echo 'export PATH=~/bin:$PATH' >>.bashrc and be done with it. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred. ``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.'' -- Linus Torvalds
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