java alternatives

[Roberto Ragusa]

anonymous wrote:

> I'm not even sure if I understand this correctly, but I can't find any
> good documentation on the alternative system.

I got in a issue very similar to yours: alternatives problem for
java (both the fedora and the jpackage rebuilt nosrc.rpm packages).

There is no documentation on this stuff anywhere.

I'll be very happy if someone replies saying I'm wrong.

> Afterwards there was a message that stated the group was now in manual
> mode instead of automatic.
> Basically my take is that when it's in automatic mode, then if you
> switch to the other version using the command
> $ alternative --config
> All the other slaves will switch associated with the group will switch
> over as well.
> Now that it is in manual mode, do I have to switch each slave myself? How?

This is almost what happended to me. It is not clear how the slaves
handle the manual/auto choice, so I manually reswitched everything to auto
by editing the files in /var/lib/alternatives.

By having a look at /var/lib/alternatives, the system appears
to be awfully messy and fragile for something as simple as symlink
management. And there is no "alternatives --recreate-all-links".

The format of the file "java" is N-couples of rows, then for each alternative
N rows with the specific paths, with no reference to the "key", only the
pointed-to place (and many lines are blank just to confuse you more).
Maybe this is because alternatives is just a shell script? No,
/usr/sbin/alternatives is an executable; no way to understand what
it does (if you don't read the source).

Definitively too complicated: (these are all java related)

   # ls -l /var/lib/alternatives/j* | wc -l
   30
   #

Is there any alternative to alternatives? ;-)

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it