Re: all xterms
maniek@beer.com (Tomasz Wegrzanowski) wrote:
> alternatives are completely nonintuitive, also look at this situation:
> user use footerm as his normal xterm. Then he installs barterm and
> 'export XTERM=barterm' do all the work. After testing he got disliking
> barterm so he installs quuxterm and 'export XTERM=quuxterm'. Then he
> think quuxterm is also lame and 'export XTERM=footerm'. How much time
> would it take by alternatives ???
If you don't like alternatives, then don't use alternatives. It is
pretty easy to add a link from /usr/local/bin to your favorite X
terminal editor. Personally, I prefer doing this to manipulating the
links in '/etc/alternatives'. (I also use a $HOME/bin directory,
which is an excellent way to do the same thing on a per user basis.)
Nevertheless, the alternatives mechanism is useful, since it allows
packages to automatically negotiate the ownership of files in the
system.
Believe it or not, environment variables are not the end all and be all
way to configure a Unix account.
> And alternatives are EXACTLY too generic, evil and results with a lot
> of bugs (symlinks to the void)
Bugs? What happens to your script if xterm isn't installed and your
special environment variable isn't set? At least the alternatives
mechanism works with rxvt (and yes, rxvt currently does support
Branden's x-terminal-emulator link) without requiring any environment
variables to be set.
Brian
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