On 23/12/2023 14:34, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
They have different use-cases. alternatives allows for co-installability (and importantly - co-"buildability" with dependencies). the X-is-X guarantees essentially the opposite.On 22/12/23 00:40, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:If you're asking about using /etc/alternatives or something like that to provide some sort of generic swapping capability, or a dpkg Provides:, such that /usr/bin/gpg on some systems would point toward the "chameleon", i would want to see some significant archive-wide testing done before we even consider inflicting that on our normal users.While we are on the topic of alternatives, I hope to see the maintscript-based /etc/alternatives paradigm deprecated in favor of the package-based X-is-X paradigm introduced by `python-is-python3`.
This becomes key if we have two different approaches desired or needed simultaneously: eg the adios parallel I/O library builds for both openmpi and mpich variants of MPI; different variants preferred for different architectures.
Regards Alastair McKinstry
-- Alastair McKinstry, GPG: 82383CE9165B347C787081A2CBE6BB4E5D9AD3A5 ph: +353 87 6847928 e: alastair@mckinstry.ie, im: @alastair:mckinstry.ie