package: dpkg version: 1.4.1.6 severity: wishlist Since I was thinking about dpkg, I've decided to pass along a minor peeve with the alternatives mechanism. I don't know if this belongs to dpkg documentation or policy or just to common wisdom, but I hope you won't mind routing it.
The request is that packagers ensure, wherever possible, that an alternative be easily usable when not the highest priority alternative, ie without being linked from the generic name. Several packages seem to assume that they will be the only alternative installed (or at least used), and do not make it convenient to use the package when a higher priority alternative is also installed. For example, the package navigator-smotif-461 installs an alternative for /usr/X11R6/bin/netscape. The alternative is /usr/lib/netscape/461/navigator/navigator-smotif . If I also have navigator-smotif-408 installed, I have /usr/lib/netscape/408/navigator/navigator-smotif , which is a lower priority alternative. Since the actual binary isn't in my PATH, I can't conveniently run the lower priority navigator. This is annoying and inconsistent with the principal that users might legitimately want to use any of the alternatives. I filed a bug against the package and the packager added symlinks in /usr/X11R6/bin called navigator-smotif-461, etc (although he didn't make these the alternatives, which would be preferable), so now any version can be used. I intend to file bugs against other packages (kaffe and jdk1.1 are the ones I just noticed). So the problem seems fairly common. I hope this can be added to some documentation somewhere. Thanks, Andrew
