emacs and /etc/alternatives

[Ed Hill]

On Fri, 9 Mar 2007 17:35:04 -0700 Kevin Fenzi <kevin at tummy.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 09 Mar 2007 14:17:40 -0800
> a.badger at gmail.com (Toshio Kuratomi) wrote:
> 
> At the risk of adding to a already too lengthy discussion... 
> 
> > As we've seen from the discussion about alternatives setting the
> > preference at the wrong level; setting the preference
> > in /usr/bin/emacs is pushing a user-preference out to the system
> > where it doesn't belong. We want the user to set the preference.
> > The script needs slight modification to have a preferred value
> > passed in via ENV VAR.
> 
> ...snipp script... 
> 
> Instead of re-inventing something like this, how about using the
> already existing "environment-modules" package? 
> http://modules.sourceforge.net/
> 
> A lot of places already use this in cluster sites or sites with lots
> of users that need different gcc, etc. 
> 
> You could have emacs-nox put in a default module, if emacs-x11 was
> installed it could change the default, but in the end, the user could
> change what they would prefer to run from the choices available to
> them installed by their sysadmin. 
> 
> I haven't used modules extensively, so I might be missing why it won't
> work in this case, but I thought I would throw the idea out there. 


Yes !!!

Unlike alternatives (which is system-oriented), environment-modules
is user-oriented.  It solves exactly the sort of user-oriented
(and multiple-user-oriented) problems that alternatives just can't.

As mentioned above, its *so* convenient for cases involving, for
example, multiple MPI or compiler or other tool installations.  It
allows *EACH* user to, at any point in time, select the version of
each tool that they want.

So please folks -- take a good look at environment-modules before
re-inventing that particular wheel.

Ed


-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD  |  ed at eh3.com  |  http://eh3.com/
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