RFC: update-alternatives

[Christopher Faylor]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2005 at 04:06:25PM -0400, Charles Wilson wrote:
>It seems there may be a need for a Debian-like update-alternatives 
>system on cygwin (see the recent thread on the main list about making 
>/bin/sh be bash instead of ash).  Also, such a system would be a better 
>approach than my cobbled-together postinstall scripts for the many new 
>versions of automake (ditto libpng).
>
>Comments and suggestions requested -- especially from Sergey Okhapkin
>if he's still here.

My only concern is that update-alternatives in any incarnation might cause
confusion for cygwin users, especially for something like /bin/sh, since
it, AFAIK, relies on symlinks.  That means that /bin/sh won't be runnable
from the Windows command prompt.

I don't know any way around this other than to make actual copies of the
file or maybe make hard links where appropriate.  Do any of the proposed
packages deal use copies or hard links already?

cgf