Bug#446462: /usr/bin/vim is left broken when alternative is manual and points to vim-full

[James Vega]

On Sat, Oct 13, 2007 at 11:21:12AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 13, 2007 at 10:43:54AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > $ LANG=C update-alternatives --display vim
> > vim - status is manual.
> 
> Uhm, are you sure this bug does apply only when the alternatives status
> is manual? It happened to me as well and I'm quite sure mine
> alternatives were set to "auto".

I specifically tested this upgrade both on my system and with piuparts
(which I'm running again right now) and everything worked fine.  I know
there was some weird stuff that had to be done with alternatives for
some screw ups I made pre-Etch which may or may not have caused
alternatives to switch to manual mode.  I remember it doing some less
than ideal configuration changes but it was necessary to prevent leaving
a bunch of stale links around.

> James, I think we can probably do an (conditional, only if set to some
> of the disappeared variants) update-alternatives --auto in the postinst
> or something like that.  This would change the semantics of manual
> alternatives, but they would be broken anyhow, now that some variants
> disappeared.

Unless something in our package is causing the alternatives to be
changed to manual, I'd prefer not to do such special casing.
Alternatives are fragile enough as it is, I'd like to limit how much we
go poking around in how they're configured.

NB, this is one of the reasons why I'd like dpkg to handle alternatives
natively.  I've had to use various hacks to attempt sane handling of
alternatives when upgrades lose slave links (#411669, fixed), no longer
provide alternatives, or other such situations.

James
-- 
GPG Key: 1024D/61326D40 2003-09-02 James Vega <jamessan at debian.org>
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