Re: Experiment: poll on "switching to vim-tiny for standard vi?"

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 05-Jan-06, 14:20 (CST), paddy <paddy@panici.net> wrote: 
> 
> Maybe I have the wrong end of the stick.
> 
> I was thinking that if you wanted another possible behaviour:
> say that optional packages don't overide important ones unless explicitly
> set that way, then you could set that policy globally.

Then the whole update-alternatives priority system is made pointless.

Part of our job as maintainers and distributors is to make choices, so
that *most* of our users don't have to. Then we generally provide a
way to override those choices, for the remainder, who disagree with a
particular choice or have a particular situation that is not covered by
our choice.

The choice we made many years ago for alternative priorities was based
on these presumptions:

A. Most people wouldn't care which of the alternative packages was
installed so long as it provided the basic funtionality. 

B. Of those who cared to install on of the variants, most would want to
use the variant by default; after all, that's why they installed the
variant.

C. The 1% not covered by A and B can use update-alternatives to set
their preferred version.

Remember that people in class C are probably in class C *only* for one
particular alternative, and are perfectly happy with the all the others.

This is really a corner case, and while one should provide for corner
cases, one probably shouldn't design around corner cases.

Steve
-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net