man update-alternatives says:
It is often useful for a number of alternatives to be
synchronised, so that they are changed as a group; for example,
when several versions of the vi(1) editor are installed, the
man page referenced by /usr/man/man1/vi.1 should correspond to
the executable referenced by /usr/bin/vi. update-alternatives
handles this by means of master and slave links; when the
master is changed, any associated slaves are changed too. A
master link and its associated slaves make up a link group.
However, that's not how it seems to work on potato. I noticed that
after the installation I got /etc/alternatives/awk pointing to
/usr/bin/mawk and /etc/alternatives/awk.1.gz pointing to
/usr/man/man1/mawk.1.gz. Since I prefer gawk, I did (as root)
update-alternatives --config /usr/bin/awk awk /usr/bin/gawk
That in fact changed the /etc/alternatives/awk link to point to gawk,
but it left the manpage link pointing to mawk.1! The same thing
happened again when I wanted to change the etags alternative (to point
to the Exuberant version).
I ended up changing the manpage links by hand. Is that safe or will
it confuse the system even more?
--
Ian Zimmerman
Lightbinders, Inc.
2325 3rd Street #324, San Francisco, California 94107
