emacs and /etc/alternatives

[Chip Coldwell]

On Fri, 9 Mar 2007, Andrew Haley wrote:

> Matthew Miller writes:
>  > On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 10:52:33PM +0100, Miloslav Trmac wrote:
>  > > > If both are functionally similar, yet the script solution avoids changes
>  > > > to the filesystem *and* is much simpler, why not stick to the script
>  > > > solution?
>  > > If you completely ignore the original purpose of alternatives and focus
>  > > only on the mechanism, following a few symlinks set up by alternatives
>  > > is actually both more effective and simpler than starting bash to
>  > > execute the script.
>  > 
>  > The overhead of bash vs. a symlink is negligible when we're talking about
>  > launching *emacs*. The real difference is: one is trivial and
>  > self-contained, whereas the other relies on an whole infrastructure.
>  
> Exactly.  This is a change without a purpose.  The existing solution
> works perfectly well: it ain't broken, so don't fix it.

It is broken in the sense that rpmlint pukes on the current emacs spec 
file, and a lot of the jiggery-pokery in there is done to support the two 
different versions of emacs and the wrapper script+symlinks currently 
being used.

Chip

-- 
Charles M. "Chip" Coldwell
Senior Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc
978-392-2426