Re: Please test master branch and update-alternatives in particular
On Sun, 22 Feb 2009, Neil Williams wrote:
> Something that may not have come up before, I'm looking for a way for
> update-alternatives to fail gracefully if things like man pages simply
> don't exist on the filesystem. (Emdebian doesn't have manpages but
> the Grip flavour does have other targets of alternatives - Crush
> drops alternatives completely.)
You should read the set of changes first. This should be taken care of
with this change:
- install slave link only if the corresponding slave file is
available. Closes: #143701
Guillem expressed a concern about this change on IRC and I tried to
explain why I believe it's the right behaviour:
<braindmg> buxy: I don't think ignoring non existing files for slave alternatives is a good idea
<braindmg> they are not only used for man pages
I had some comments in 505207
<buxy> braindmg: I've read those comments but: 1/ you can't store whether the slave is optional in the db without breaking backwards compatibily and you want to be able to repair the alternative not only in --install
2/ the ratio of non-optional slave compared to those who are is rather big in practice
3/ the old update-alternatives did not fail when the target file was missing, it simply created dangling symlinks
(the problem only arised when the alternative link had to be created in a non-existing dir)
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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