On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:29 PM, Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 7:00 PM, Philip Brown <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> ick. that's rather user-unfriendly. > > On the contrary, this is exactly why it's user friendly. You don't > have to know about update-alternatives command line to manage your > alternatives.
But you DO have to know in depth about your target program. You might not KNOW all the places you need to symlink, as a user. picture sendmail. It has MULTIPLE things that need to be replaced. sendmail itself, plus mailq, plus newaliases, (and possibly more?) The most userfriendly thing to do, is provide a nice simple one-stop interface, that allows the user to say, [i want CSWpostfix to completely replace the functionality of sendmail on my box] the ANTI-friendly thing to do, is to default the user to, [it's up to you to know and remember all the places sun sendmail has hooks into your system] > If someone wants to type less, they should be > intelligent enough to use the power of alias. This is a very bad attitude in my opinion. You are essentially saying "well, we COULD make things easier for the user... but we choose to make them do the work themselves". "update-alternatives" is a *20 character command*. Gary extols the virtues of doing things in a "unixy way". I would point out that having ludicrously long command names is not a "unixy way". Rather, the opposite. > Of course, nothing prevents humans from using the update-alternatives > command line. _______________________________________________ maintainers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.opencsw.org/mailman/listinfo/maintainers
