Re: F43 Change Proposal: Use update-alternatives for managing NodeJS symlinks (self contained)

[Vít Ondruch]

Dne 14. 07. 25 v 16:27 Jan Stanek napsal(a):

Hello everyone!

On Fri, Jul 11, 2025 at 9:09 AM Vitaly Zaitsev via devel
<devel@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:

On 10/07/2025 13:14, Aoife Moloney via devel-announce wrote:

We aim to move away from manual management of
<code>/usr/bin/node</code>, <code>/usr/bin/npm</code>, and similar
symlinks to leveraging update-alternatives system.

AFAIK, the alternatives system doesn't work reliably on immutable
(ostree) Fedora versions.

Thanks for raising this issue; we of course forgot about rpm-ostree
and what complications it could bring. This is a compelling argument
to reconsider.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/Alternatives/




Vít

Perhaps somebody would not mind to update this guidelines section reflecting this information? In my reading, this section (kind of) promotes the alternatives, while this feedback suggest quite strongly against.

If you need to provide multiple /usr/bin/node symlinks, consider
generating swappable packages: nodeAB-bin, nodeXY-bin, etc. Then users
will be able to use dnf swap feature:

sudo dnf swap nodeAB-bin nodeXY-bin --allowerasing

And thanks for this idea as well – this would not occur to me
instinctively, since I would assume that installing one stream
(including the -bin package) would prevent installation of any other
streams (as it would conflict with the other -bin package). Then I
read up some more on weak dependencies and as it turns out, dnf is
smart enough to remove any Recommended package from the transaction if
it would cause a conflict. With this information, the swappable
package approach seems doable. I'll update the wiki page with the
feedback and we'll start experimenting with it.

Best regards!

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