Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Karl DeBisschop]

On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 14:57, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Karl DeBisschop (kdebisschop at alert.infoplease.com) said: 
> > On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 10:43, Robert Marcano wrote:
> > 
> > > > However, that won't be the ONLY feature of Fedora Core 2.  I'd like to
> > > > hear people's wishlists...
> > > 
> > > Make default applications configurable, for example instead of Mozilla
> > > Web Browser, call it Web Browser and allows the user to change it
> > > without messing around with the .desktop files
> > 
> > We have a system mechanism for this in the alternatives system. Any
> > chance of extending that to provide a uniform user-level way of
> > specifying alternatives?
> 
> I'd prefer not; the alternatives hack is something that should be
> severely limited in where it's used.

Are there alternatives to alternatives?

While I agree that it has some real shortcomings, there are also
shortcomings to having the user-land equivalents be totally divorced
from alternatives. There are also shortcomings to having the KDE and
Gnome equivalents be divorced from each other and having to set default
browsers in both.

And icing on the cake, the PostgreSQL smooth-upgrade effort will
probably end up reimplementing the functionality of alternatives because
alternatives itself is too limited for the task at present.

So yes, it may be a hack. But isn't one hack better than 4?

Or is there another option?

-- 
Karl DeBisschop <kdebisschop at alert.infoplease.com>
Pearson Education/Information Please