On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 11:51:13PM +0200, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: > The "alternatives" mechanisms was invented by debian and adopted by > Mandrake (do you use their packages? Or is it a later version or RH?) > > It is aimed at solving file-conflicts between packages. For example: both > sendmail and postfix have /usr/sbin/sendmail .
Not exactly; it was aimed at allowing the user to choose which of a set of packages (which provide compatible interfaces) should be used to provide that interface on the system. /usr/sbin/sendmail is a good example. While several packages can provide /usr/sbin/sendmail, they also usually conflict with one another because they are configured to listen on the smtp port (not because of file conflicts). -- - mdz
