[gentoo-dev] Re: Handling multiple packages providing the same convenience symlink

[Alexander Skwar]

Hi!

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

> via the traditional names. Suddenly we have a problem -- what if a user
> has more than one of these packages installed?

I found this thread because of your reference in
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69852

As I wrote in that bug, I like the Debian way very much. Debian
uses "update-alternatives" (u-a) to resolve these issues. There, /usr/bin/vi
is a symlink to /etc/alternatives/vi is a symlink to /usr/bin/vi.vim.
u-a allows to "associate" a number of files to one "alternative".
For example, it "might" make sense to also have a /usr/share/man/man1/vi.1
to always point to the correct man page. The user/admin can then
easily change all the associated files at once with one simple call;
something like "update-alternatives --config vi".

It be pretty great if something like this could be incorporated
in Gentoo.

Alexander Skwar
-- 
Infinity attracts us like a floodlight in the night, blinding us to the
excesses it can inflict upon the finite.

  -- Meditations from Bifrost Eyrie, Buddislamic Text
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯


--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list