Re: Bug#534507: ITP: kalternatives -- graphical alternatives system configuration tool

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi Pino!

On Thu, 2009-06-25 at 01:02:12 +0200, Pino Toscano wrote:
> Package: wnpp
> Severity: wishlist
> Owner: Pino Toscano <pino@kde.org>
> 
> * Package name    : kalternatives
>   Version         : 0.12
>   Upstream Author : Pino Toscano <pino@kde.org>
> * URL             : http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Kalternatives?content=16016
> * License         : GPL
>   Programming Lang: C++
>   Description     : graphical alternatives system configuration tool
> 
>  Kalternatives offers a GUI to configure the alternative systems (a
>  system that allows you to select one alternative file for many in the
>  filesystem).
>  .
>  This is an advanced GUI of the update-alternatives program shipped with dpkg.

I've skimmed over the sources, and it seems kalternatives is reading
and writting directly to the alternatives db (under
/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/). The db should be considered internal,
and we reserve the right to change its layout in the future.

There's been recent changes to update-alternatives to make it more
friendly and usable by front-ends (specifically the --get/set-selections
and --query options), could you consider rewritting it using those?
If the interface is inadequate or too limited we can always extend/fix
it.

Another option would be to wait a bit, the future plans are to
rewrite it in C and move part of the db handling to a shared library.

thanks,
guillem