/etc/alternatives not quite working

Colin Walters walters at verbum.org
Fri May 2 17:45:14 UTC 2008


On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> wrote:
>
>  I had one fresh F7 install (out of a hundred or so) where emacs was
>  installed but the alternatives stuff just wasn't done at all.  All of
>  the installs were identical (all i386, same kickstart files/package
>  set, though the hardware itself differs wildly).  I couldn't figure
>  out what had gone wrong, and reinstalling emacs fixed things up.

There's some sort of binary state files in /var/lib/alternatives; I
once had a problem on one of our servers where the /usr/bin/java
alternative was screwed up, and eventually traced it down to what
appeared to be corruption of that file.

I fixed it by blowing it away and reinstalling the package,
attributing it to a heisenbug, but maybe there is some sort of race or
periodic flaw in the alternatives system.




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