[csw-maintainers] Alternatives

[Philip Brown]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:29 PM, Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski
<maciej at opencsw.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 7:00 PM, Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com> 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.