[csw-maintainers] Alternatives without automatic selection

[Philip Brown]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 1:59 AM, Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:
> ...
> Ok then, so you say identical prios are an error. That means
> sendmail would get 100 and postfix 200 (or vice versay, doesn't
> matter for the moment). User installs sendmail and configures it.
> Than much later postfix is installed and everything breaks.
> Does this sound better to you than my proposal?

Thank you for bringing up that example. We should definitely augment
our documentation to cover it.

I have two comments.

#1: What you describe is, unfortunately, an example of another way to
incorrectly implement 'alternatives' in a package. A package should
not trigger 'alternatives', until what is referenced, is actually
functional. We should document use of 'alternatives' to be clear about
this.


#2:  here's the biggest thing: .
If you dont like the fact that the user will automatically get a
different implementation inserted underneath things, when they install
a higher priority implementation, I can understand that.
But  ***this is exactly how they (LINUX alternatives) were designed to work***!

So if you dont like the way that feels as a user, then please make a
formal proposal suggesting we stop trying to emulate "linux
alternatives", and start using "Dagobert's Special Program
Switcher(tm)" instead  :-D