[csw-maintainers] Problem with "alternatives" on updates

[Philip Brown]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 8:54 AM, Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:

> I guess we need
> update-hook-scripts to handle this cleanly.

I'm guessing we just need to think more carefully about how the PKG
system works.
Lets analyze things a little more deeply.



> I have tested alternatives on CSWautomake to switch
> automake/aclocal between the included versions
> 1.6 to 1.11. The problem is that if I manually select
> a version (like 1.10) and then try to upgrade the
> package the selection is not preserved. On
> package deinstallation the choices are removed
> from the alternatives system,

Q1: do you mean "on deinstallation of CSWautomake"? I presume yes, but
just want to make sure.

Q2: Where is the information about the user choice stored?
Is it solely in the symlink?
If so, seems like the simple choice is to not have the symlink be part
of the prototype file of CSWautomake, and then it wont go away.

Contrariwise, if you want to keep the regular filesystem "clean" after
pkgrm, then you may consider a between-installations symlink
preservation class.
You could use cswpreserveconf as a model.

Although you would probably want more than just a "preservesymlink"
class. You would probably want a
"cswsymlinkalternatives" class, to make it hook in more fully to the
"alternatives" package.