On Tuesday 11 May 2010 16:04:29 Amos Shapira wrote:
> On 11 May 2010 22:01, geoffrey mendelson <geoffreymendel...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> > On May 11, 2010, at 2:52 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> >> Ubuntu packages three Javas, but only the Sun Java has any worth. The
> >> other two only serve to mess up Sun Java installs. Stay away from
> >> them.
> >
> > Ouch, that brings back another UBUNTU problem. It does not install Java
> > (are most programs) in /usr/bin. It installs them in /usr/bin under
> > another name, or eleswhere. Then it links /etc/alternatives/<name> to
> > them. Then it links /usr/bin/<name> to /etc/alternatives/<name>.
>
> That's actually part of the inheritance from Debian. Debian tends to
> have a long history behind most of their decisions so this system
> makes sense there. I'm not sure how different is Ubuntu from it
> though.
>
Last time I checked (Debian 3.1 or so), Debian did not take the
/etc/alternatives system to its natural conclusion though. I noticed that when
I wanted to install postfix on what was then eskimo.iglu.org.il, I had to
uninstall qmail (which I wanted to get rid of eventually), because the
/usr/sbin/sendmail file conflicted between the two packages. Later on, when I
worked on Fedora, I was able to install Postfix as well as sendmail (the
Fedora default) because I could play with the symlinks in /etc/alternatives
and other places. It's possible it was fixed in Debian since then.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
Best Introductory Programming Language - http://shlom.in/intro-lang
God considered inflicting XSLT as the tenth plague of Egypt, but then
decided against it because he thought it would be too evil.
Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
_______________________________________________
Linux-il mailing list
Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il
http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
