/etc/alternatives contains files

[Bob Brewer <grantura@spamcop.net>]

Hi

Some packages failed to upgrade in my lenny to squeeze update because 
updare-alternatives encountered a file rather than a symbolic link. An 
example of this was fakeroot which produced the error:

"update-alternatives: error: readlink(/etc/alternatives/fakeroot) 
failed: Invalid argument"

The file (/etc/alternatives/fakeroot) contains a shell script which has 
the comment:

"# This script first starts faked (the daemon), and then it will run
# the requested program with fake root privileges."

After I moved this file out of the way I was able to upgrade the package 
fakeroot and new symbolic links were generated.

There are over 100 of these files in the /etc/alternatives directory all 
dating from the same date in 2008 and presumably left over from a 
previous upgrade.

Would it be safe to delete these files and run update-alternatives to 
generate new symbolic links.


Bob