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

[Philip Brown]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:
> Hi Phil,
>

*wave*


> Am 22.03.2010 um 19:40 schrieb Philip Brown:
>>

>> I will repeat my question/request, that before people can make
>> suggestiions for solutions, they first need to be better informed on
>> exactly what our "alternatives" system does in /etc/opt.
>>


>
> Alternatives makes a link from the thing to choose to
> /etc/opt/csw/alternatives/<pkg>.
> There is another link to the final file which is automacially handled by
> alternatives.

HHMMM... this is surprising to me. If I am reading this correctly, it
seems like you are saying something like;


ls -l /opt/csw/bin/alternative-switched-prog     ->
    /etc/opt/csw/alternatives/[PKG]/alternative-switch-prog



ls -l /etc/opt/csw/alternatives/[PKG]/alternative-switch-prog  ->
        /opt/csw/bin/real-location-prog


Does that basically summarize it?

I am surprised because I thought it would be more like


ls -l /opt/csw/bin/alternative-switched-prog     ->
       real-location-prog

 /etc/opt/csw/alternatives/[PKG]/alternative-switch-prog
     [is a file, describing "preferred" destination of symlink]


> The idea would be to have a cas script that reads the csw.conf if it
> is NFS shared or not and when in NFS-share-mode it makes one static link
> without
> alternatives. I could add this to the existing alternatives CAS. Comments?

that may be one way to do it. However, It "feels" to me, to be better
to be more consistent about the user-touching implementation.
By that I mean, it might be nice if possible to consistently have the
symlink be 'directly' to the target, whether NFS shared or otherwise.

That has the additional benefit that you do not have to do any
"special configuration" if you want to do mixed modes.
That is to say, you could have a completely locally installed,
"regular" CSW package installation on one machine, and then use

rsync -a /opt/csw/.   nfs-master:/opt/csw
  (or to any other machine, maybe just a "client" instead of nfs server!)

and have it "work right" after copying.