The CSWalternatives package is currently under developtment. Please stay tuned on the project-alternatives page for up-to-date information.
The goal of this package is to ease the selection of different tools with the similar functionality under a specific name which will be stable on updates. To achieve this we chose to package the Red Hat variant of alternatives from the "checkpkg" package1
Packages currently using "alternatives"
These packages have not been released to current/, please try them from experimental/
- CSWautomake (for selection of version)
- CSWmutt (for selection of slang and ncurses)
- CSWtcpwrap (for selection of standard and extended syntax)
Manually selecting an alternative
To manually select an alternative from a package use
/opt/csw/sbin/alternatives --config <group>
Usually the name of the group is the same as the catalog name, e. g. "automake", "mutt" or "tcpwrappers".
Please see the manpage for details2.
How package upgrades are handled
When a package is removed the possible selections contained in the package are removed from the linkgroup. When the group is in manual mode and the currently selected item is about to be removed the selection is stored in a preservation area.
On package installation it is checked if there is a preserved selection for this package. If this is the case, the selection is reinstantiated.
GAR integration
This is documented in the GAR wiki.
Internals
TBD.
