emacs and /etc/alternatives

[John Dennis]

On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 12:33 -0500, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Friday 09 March 2007 12:27:11 Chip Coldwell wrote:
> > Then I suggested dropping the emacs-nox package.
> >
> > That met with strenous objections.
> 
> Where?  I saw one objection.
> 
> You could also keep the emacs-nox package and just name it emacs-nox.  If 
> you're purposefully setting up a box without X libs and with emacs-nox, you 
> probably are capable of running emacs-nox instead of 'emacs'.

No, bad idea. Too many humans, scripts, environment variables, etc.
depend on the 'emacs' name.

Here is the summary as I see it:

There is nothing wrong with rpmlint, it is properly complaining about
two packages which both claim to own the same file, that's a conflict
and we don't want conflicts.

To get us to a situation where there can be two versions of emacs (a
reasonable goal) we have the following choices:

* have a package which owns /usr/bin/emacs and install a script to start
the preferred version. emacs and emacs-nox both require this package.

* use alternatives (yuck!), I don't think it's appropriate for this
purpose and its just plain nasty, but it solves the file conflict
problem.

I think the first solution is preferable, a master package, plus there
are many files in emacs which would be shared between X version and the
nox version, these can all go in the master package.
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>