Dave Korn wrote: > Sounds more to me like you forgot to use the alternatives program to > configure the alternatives and have been messing around manually in its > private data directories and broken it. > > (You're not the first person to do this. For some reason it seems to > be a hard-to-resist temptation for people to just dive into the data > directories and start tampering, rather than say reading the > alternatives readme or man/info page which would explain the easy-to-use > command-line syntax by which alternatives.exe will switch over the > symlinks correctly.)
I see two problems here: 1) Unless you already know that /etc/alternatives is a 'managed' directory, there's nothing to suggest that there's any tool associated with it, and certainly nothing to suggest that there's an associated database. 2) It's so easy to manually change the links that it's unlikely anyone is going to spend time looking for some (possibly non-existent) tool to do it. By the time you've found the right tool, you could have changed the link and got on with whatever you were trying to do in the first place. When the directory first appeared on Linux, I thought the links were just set up manually. It took me a while to discover that they were managed, and that was only by digging around in RPMs for post-install scripts to find out what kept changing my X desktop manager after an update. For the first problem, I think it would help avoid installation problems if the directory contained a simple README file explaining how to properly maintain the links, and why manually changing them is a bad idea. To avoid looking like just another link, and thus getting overlooked, I think this should be a real file, rather than a symlink to the README in the doc directory. Maybe Chuck could add this to the cygwin alternatives package, or perhaps he would prefer the upstream chkconfig maintainer to consider it. For the second problem, perhaps it would also help if the names of the links in the alternatives directory were a hash of the program name. E.g. /usr/bin/gs -> /etc/alternatives/9ad6a289eea9c92be09d3a5a8bc737e6 /etc/alternatives/9ad6a289eea9c92be09d3a5a8bc737e6 -> /usr/bin/gs-x11 where 9ad6a289eea9c92be09d3a5a8bc737e6 is the md5sum of "/usr/bin/gs". This would make it much more obvious that the links were managed, or at least give one pause for thought before diving in. Phil This email has been scanned by Ascribe PLC using Microsoft Antigen for Exchange. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
