[csw-maintainers] Bugreport on alternatives with NFS-shared /opt/csw

[Philip Brown]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 11:12 AM, James Lee <james at opencsw.org> wrote:
>
>
> Would neon would be better served by an auxiliary flag (see ld(1)).
>[...]
>
>
> This has the effect that when anything looks for libneon.so it will
> get libneon-full.so if it exists otherwise just it gets libneon.so
>
>

James makes an interesting point, both for neon specifically, but for
"alternatives" in general.

There are multiple cases where we are proposing using the
"alternatives" set of utils for packages:

1. Where there is truely different functionality available, and user
has to choose either/or.
Examples: tcpwrappers libs, and the "ncurses or slang back end" for mutt.

2. Where there is optionally "enhanced" functionality. In which case,
we allow for "alternatives", mostly to save on download footprint, and
dependancy footprint.

[are there any other cases?]


For categories that fit #2, if there is a clean "use libxxxx-full if
installed" option, it seems like the auxiliary linking flag is
probably the better way to go in most cases.
As such, perhaps we should both update the neon package like that, and
also update our "alternatives" documentation, to explicitly redirect
the maintainer to this path when it is appropriate?