Re: man dangling symlink question
On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 at 08:35 GMT, Colin Watson penned:
> On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 07:59:20PM -0500, Michael D Schleif wrote:
>> It seems endemic that many package changes are ignorant of that dark
>> corner of dpkg package that is /usr/sbin/update-alternatives -- why
>> is that?
>
> It doesn't help that update-alternatives has historically been buggy
> and prone to randomly set links back to auto mode when you didn't want
> it to. Furthermore, it's very unclear exactly when packages are
> supposed to call update-alternatives in order to get upgrades right,
> and there's still no policy on this (see bug #71621).
>
I'd never heard of update-alternatives or /etc/alternatives until a few
days ago on this list, and to be honest I'm still a little (a lot) foggy
on what exactly it's used for. For instance, I have
/etc/alternatives/vi and /etc/alternatives/editor ... what applications
will use these values? To make it even more confusing, I see the
following:
monique@home:~$ ls -l /usr/bin/vi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Jun 30 2002 /usr/bin/vi ->
/etc/alternatives/vi*
Obviously, this is an example of "something" using alternatives, but in
this case, what was the "something"? How do I find out which packages
are using "alternatives"?
Sorry for all the ignorant questions; the whole system sounds vaguely
promising, but I can't quite get a grip on it yet.
--
monique
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