Bug#2378: Gawk postinst script does not work correctly
'Michael Meskes wrote:'
>
>Package: gawk
>Version: 3.0.0-1
>
>Here's what I got trying to install gawk after haveing install mawk:
>
>dpkg --install gawk-3.0.0-1.deb
>(Reading database ... 13271 files and directories currently installed.)
>Preparing to replace gawk (using gawk-3.0.0-1.deb) ...
>Unpacking replacement gawk ...
>Setting up gawk ...
>Checking available versions of awk, updating links in /etc/alternatives ...
>(You may modify the symlinks there yourself if desired - see 'man ln'.)
>Updating awk (/usr/bin/awk) to point to /usr/bin/mawk.
>Updating nawk.1 (/usr/man/man1/nawk.1) to point to /usr/man/man1/mawk.1.
>Updating nawk (/usr/bin/nawk) to point to /usr/bin/mawk.
>Updating awk.1 (/usr/man/man1/awk.1) to point to /usr/man/man1/mawk.1.
>
>I would expect these links to go to gawk.
>
>This may be a bug in update-alternatives though.
Nope, it's a design decision I made (as package maintainer for mawk and
gawk). gawk is too slow and too big for our base series (IMO), but
useful (due to its extensions) for awk hackers (so I recommended that
mawk go into the base series and gawk into the devel series). mawk is
fully POSIX complient. Therefore, IMO mawk should be the default. I
have done some gawk vs. mawk performance tests
(ftp://ftp.netaxs.com/people/cjf/debian/awk) and tried to start a
discussion on comp.lang.awk. To date I've only had two comments. One
was from Bill Davidson who also likes mawk and noticed that it was
much faster than gawk for most operations (sorry about these
intensional comments, I have saved the posts and can provide them to
interested parties). The other was from from Arnold Robbins (author of
gawk) who commented that of course mawk was faster, but he hoped to
merge mawk and gawk at some point (actually Robbins' post on
comp.lang.awk was in a different thread than the one I started).
If anyone notices any shortcomings of mawk, please let me know. But
I'm pretty sure that my analysis is close to the "Truth". Hence I'm
closing the bug report.
If you want to make gawk the default awk, edit
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/awk (I think that's the path - not at a
Debian system right now) and then run update-alternatives by hand (-h
to get help). I've submitted a bug report (#1921) and patch to
update-alternatives in an attempt to make it easier to perform this
operation. I believe that bug is still outstanding.
>Michael
>--
>Michael Meskes
>Lehrstuhl fuer angewandte Mathematik insb. Informatik
>RWTH-Aachen, D-52056 Aachen, Germany
>email: meskes@informatik.rwth-aachen.de
>
--
Christopher J. Fearnley | UNIX SIG Leader at PACS
cjf@netaxs.com | (Philadelphia Area Computer Society)
http://www.netaxs.com/~cjf | Design Science Revolutionary
ftp://ftp.netaxs.com/people/cjf | Explorer in Universe
"Dare to be Naive" -- Bucky Fuller | Linux Advocate
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