"Monique Y. Herman" <spam@bounceswoosh.org> [2003:10:09:12:03:32-0600] scribed: > On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 at 08:35 GMT, Colin Watson penned: > > On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 07:59:20PM -0500, Michael D Schleif wrote: > >> It seems endemic that many package changes are ignorant of that dark > >> corner of dpkg package that is /usr/sbin/update-alternatives -- why > >> is that? > > > > It doesn't help that update-alternatives has historically been buggy > > and prone to randomly set links back to auto mode when you didn't want > > it to. Furthermore, it's very unclear exactly when packages are > > supposed to call update-alternatives in order to get upgrades right, > > and there's still no policy on this (see bug #71621). > > I'd never heard of update-alternatives or /etc/alternatives until a few > days ago on this list, and to be honest I'm still a little (a lot) foggy > on what exactly it's used for. For instance, I have > /etc/alternatives/vi and /etc/alternatives/editor ... what applications > will use these values? To make it even more confusing, I see the > following: > > monique@home:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/vi > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Jun 30 2002 /usr/bin/vi -> > /etc/alternatives/vi* > > Obviously, this is an example of "something" using alternatives, but in > this case, what was the "something"? How do I find out which packages > are using "alternatives"? > > Sorry for all the ignorant questions; the whole system sounds vaguely > promising, but I can't quite get a grip on it yet. # dpkg -L dpkg | grep alternatives | sort /etc/alternatives /etc/alternatives/README /usr/sbin/update-alternatives /usr/share/man/fr/man8/update-alternatives.8.gz /usr/share/man/ja/man8/update-alternatives.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/update-alternatives.8.gz /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives # man update-alternatives -- Best Regards, mds mds resource 877.596.8237 - Dare to fix things before they break . . . - Our capacity for understanding is inversely proportional to how much we think we know. The more I know, the more I know I don't know . . . --
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