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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ 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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]