[csw-maintainers] Alternatives

[Philip Brown]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Sebastian Kayser <skayser at opencsw.org> wrote:
> Philip Brown wrote on 18.12.2009 22:11:
>>
>>
>> As a pre-argument I would mention: what strong argument do you have
>> for specifically NOT putting it in?  It in no way detracts from the
>> functionality, and it definately enhances it. It also allows us to
>> give it a bit more csw personality at the same time, which is an
>> additional bonus.
>>
>> Not to mention it is a trivial amount of work to do. Just add a symlink.
>
> A slight concern of mine would be: besides the symlink, it is another
> invocation method that one has to keep in mind. update-alternatives on
> it's own is canonical and well-known from Debian, add cswua (or similar)
> to the mix and it will introduce ambiguity when people start talking
> about tools.

by that argument, you might say that me naming "pkg-get" as such, and
not "apt-get", was just too confusing, because since the userland
syntax is the same, and it IS a 90% clone of apt-get, I should have
kept the name as apt-get.

I posit this argument to be false :-)

Taking some of what you said into account, however:
I would further suggest, that our OFFICIAL name, for it, be the
shorter name, and the longer name of "update-alternatives" be present
only for people whose minds are not flexible enough to realize they
arent running debian any more.

(if people want to pretend they are EXACTLY the same as debian..
that's what nexenta is for, after all? ;-)

There, we have resolved the "ambiguity problem"  :-D

Besides which, it is more than likely down the road, that at some
point, we will want the finer points of our alternatives system to be
a little different from the debian one.
At which point, if we have trained users to refer to it as the debian
name, it will be all the more confusing.





> In the end I would bet you a crate of beer that there are more OpenCSW
> users who would potentially be exposed to update-alternatives/cswua and
> ambiguity than there are OpenCSW users who are currently exposed to
> non-autocompletion-shells. ;)


I would be more willing to take you up on that bet, if we had a decent
short-name alternative to put to a vote ;)

besides which: you have conflicts even with "autocompletion shells",
all the way out to "update".

try this:

grep bin/update /var/sadm/install/contents |nawk '{print $1}'

or worse,

grep bin/up /var/sadm/install/contents |nawk '{print $1}'