Hi, I'd appreciate it if someone who knows how update-alternatives is *supposed* to be used could read through bug 38584 and say who's right.
Briefly, I consider the alternatives and priorities a package installs to be "static" information; configuration should be done by changing symlinks in /etc/alternatives and so causing update-alternatives to switch the link in question to manual mode when it next tries to process it. On the other hand, the author of the "update-ispell-dictionary" script in the ispell package seemed to think that it was okay to - have all ispell dictionaries installed with the same priority - manipulate the priorities afterwards to effect configuration changes - parse the output of "update-alternatives --display" to work out how to do this. all of which seems highly suspect and quite evil to me. The way I've implemented yada's alternatives-handling is simply to call "update-alternatives --install" in the postinst, and "update-alternatives --remove" in the prerm, with no guards. My correspondent thinks I should guard the "--remove" command such that it doesn't run when the package is being upgraded -- many packages do it this way. I don't think this would be appropriate for yada; it would cause problems when a yada-built package stopped providing an alternative that an older version provided. On the other hand, the way I'm doing it at the moment causes problems for packages trying to install ispell dictionaries using yada's alternatives handler. My reaction to this is "update-ispell-dictionary is B.A.D., work around it by hand". Luckily, yada doesn't force alternatives to be installed using its own alternatives handling mechanism. Is there anyone here who feels qualified to give an authoritative ruling on all this? [Please CC me on the discussion, since I'm not subscribed to debian-dpkg. Thanks.] Thanks, -- Charles Briscoe-Smith My web page: <URL:http://www.debian.org/%7Ecpbs/> PGP public keyprint: 74 68 AB 2E 1C 60 22 94 B8 21 2D 01 DE 66 13 E2
