Package: debhelper Version: 13.6 Severity: wishlist Thanks for dh_installalternatives! I've wanted this for literally decades, and discovered it this evening; it's allowed me to convert a few more maintainer scripts to being managed entirely by debhelper.
In a couple of cases, I've found that I have existing alternatives pointing to symlinks created by dh_link. Arguably I suppose it might be possible to chase the symlink through to its ultimate target, but the intermediate target shows up in "update-alternatives --display" and so has some documentation value; I also suspect that changing the alternative target would require some care to preserve sysadmin choices. I'd therefore prefer to leave these alternatives as they are when translating them to dh_installalternatives. However, dh_installalternatives checks that the alternative target exists, and inconveniently it runs before dh_link. I've had to work around this in two different packages so far by creating symlinks manually: https://salsa.debian.org/ssh-team/openssh/-/commit/6575c90a6ba442634f55947bc84c998c3fb2b4fe https://salsa.debian.org/debian/trn4/-/commit/8fd3325a740ac1655956d283aa5d64d77440d0cc This seems like enough to be worth filing a bug. Might it make sense to move dh_installalternatives to just after dh_link in the root sequence so that this sort of hack isn't needed? -- Colin Watson (he/him) [[email protected]]
