[csw-maintainers] Alternatives

[Philip Brown]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski
<maciej at opencsw.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com> wrote:
>> I like the concept of the alternatives system. I'm suggesting we
>> implement debian normal behavior, and then *augment* it, to be better.
>> Such as, including a short-command invocation.
>
> If I sent CSWalternatives as is for release, what would you say?
>

I would say, "please add a symlink for a shorter name to type, and I'd
be happy to drop it in" :-)

Otherwise, if you wished to argue aobut it, then things get complicated.
Given that this is a proposed addition to the standard CSW toolset,
its very important to make at "all it can be", as it were :-)
It's not my decision alone, but I'd want to have a decent open
discussion/vote on it. either via the board, or the maintainer list.

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.


  ************

Erm... now that I'm taking a deeper look at it though... are you sure
this thing is going to work ok for us? Its got a whoole lot of stuff,
rather explicitly labeled "Dpkg". Virtually the whole thing, seems to
be a bunch of perl modules under /opt/csw/share/perl/csw/Dpkg

That makes me worried. A whole bunch of extra code that "isnt needed"
but still laying around, has a tendancy to bite you in the rear later
when you least expect it.

The concept doesnt sound too terribly difficult. If I had more time, I
would simply write a clean 'workalike', as I did when I created
pkg-get to stand in for apt-get.
I would guess it shouldnt take a competant shellscript programmer more
than a few hours.
However, I have 3 children to take care of this weekend, so I dont
HAVE "a few hours" myself to spare.


PS: if you dont realize how seriously I take user-level compatibility
in "workalikes", you probably havent compared output of
"apt-get moo" vs "pkg-get moo"

;-)