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by test_epsilon 1805 days ago
The same acronym is underhanded.

And it's entirely possible to use different software names for projects that implement a compatible API or service, the claim that it's for compatibility is pretty bogus. It's not "standard", especially not for an adversarial fork. And that's not why the alternatives system exists, the alternatives system exists so differently named packages can implement a particular service (i.e., exactly the opposite, for the equivalent in shell commands). So that's underhanded.
1 comments
viraptor 1805 days ago
Alternatives works that way, because conflicting binary names are messy to handle, but at the same time it works that way, because that's the behaviour you normally want in your system. You want "a grep" and "an awk" and many others.
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test_epsilon 1805 days ago
I know how alternatives work, and they are not used to make packages with the same named binaries drop in replacements.

They are used to make packages with differently named binaries able to implement standard shell commands.

There is no need to match binary names. It doesn't really help with anything.

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