On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 09:08:52PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote: > On 03/16/2012 18:47, Eric van Gyzen wrote: > > On 03/16/2012 08:25 PM, Doug Barton wrote: > >> On 03/14/2012 15:14, Jonathan Anderson wrote: > >>> In fact, the runtime behaviour of the Debian "alternatives" system is > >>> simpler than that: > >>> http://segfault.in/2010/04/using-the-debian-alternatives-system/ > > [...] > >> This sounds like a good solution to more than one problem. Does anyone > >> know why they indirect through 2 sets of symlinks? That article doesn't > >> touch on the "why?" only the what. > > > > Do you mean, why do they do > > /usr/bin/vim -> /etc/alternatives/vim -> /usr/bin/vim.gtk > > instead of > > /usr/bin/vim -> /usr/bin/vim.gtk > > ? > > > > Someone's choice of a vi-like editor would be considered configuration, > > so it belongs in /etc. > > If that's the *only* reason then it seems to me that it would be better > solved by being able to express that in a config file in /usr/local/etc > which the alternate-updater script takes into account. But I need to > install debian for other reasons anyway, so I'll look at this in more > detail. Thanks. > As I already said I started working on something equivalent for freebsd: http://people.freebsd.org/~bapt/alternative.txt but never found time to finish. Why to symlink, this is 1/ because it concerns user/admin configuration, 2 it allows to change it even with your /usr/local/bin mounted RO. regards, Bapt
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