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Re: appropriate use of /etc/alternatives



On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 02:25:48PM -0400, Ben Collins wrote:
> I agree. A user should not have to concern themselves about which one
> they are using. If the command name is the same, they better support the
> same functionality.

But they do support the same functionality, just on different formats of
data file.  There are plenty of cases where a user needs to be aware of
which specific alternative they're using.  /usr/bin/zsh can run zsh
version 3 or 4, depending on alternatives.  If the user is going to
write a script in zsh, he better know which version he's getting,
otherwise he may write code using a feature not present in the version
he's running.  On some level, zsh3 is incompatible with zsh4, though
they both basically do the same thing.  Same with the two
xplot tools.

> Sounds to me like you don't even want to call the package just xplot, to
> avoid confusion. Maybe xplot-ng? :)

Well obviously my package won't be called xplot, there's already an
xplot package.  But I don't want to rename the binary that gets
installed by it.  If we can't use alternatives to manage /usr/bin/xplot
in this case, my package will simply end up conflicting with the
existing xplot package, which is neither necessary nor desirable.

noah

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