Re: [gentoo-dev] gentoo text editors

[Brian Friday]

Matthew Kennedy wrote:
>
> Really they are the same thing in the general sense.  IIRC, Debian's
> alternative system works like this (arrows are symlinks)
>
>   /usr/bin/editor --> /etc/alternatives/editor
>   /etc/alternatives/editor --> /usr/bin/emacs
>
> Just a simple indirection, really.
>

Redhat implements something similar for their bundled MTA's 
and just like above you just change the "mta" to be your 
favorite.  All the applications which call sendmail are now 
routed to sendmail.exim or sendmail.postfix. This type of 
setup is an elegant way of allowing the user to choose the 
tool they want. Though it could take a bit of legwork to 
find all the places this type of change would work best.

In one sense I see this as being very much like SLOT in 
portage right now (at least as I understand slot as a user) 
but this specific idea while similar goes further than slot 
in some ways and not as far as others.  In a, I don't 
maintain portage so don't know how hard this might be to 
implement brainstorm, maybe enhancing SLOT or the idea 
behind it to do the following. If two ebuilds which deploy 
similar applications are called for and they block each 
other (ie I try to install postfix when exim or qmail are 
already installed). The portage system automatically engages 
"SWITCH" which would then setup the applications to have the 
symlink structure like shown above.

Of course this only works in situations where a block has 
been identified by developers but perhaps (again thinking 
way ahead) doing a scan after the package has been imaged 
(ie /var/tmp/portage/pkgname/image) but before it is merged.

To keep things gentoo-ish we could leverage portage and make 
a "switch" area like:

/etc/switch/net-mail/postfix
/etc/switch/net-mail/exim
/etc/switch/app-editor/emacs
/etc/switch/app-editor/vi

my 2cents

- Brian


--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list