etc alternatives craziness

[Christopher Chan]

Ed Lazerus wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Karl F. Larsen <klarsen1 at gmail.com 
> <mailto:klarsen1 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Ed Lazerus wrote:
>     > Dear list,
>     >
>     > Can someone please tell me how can I disable and prevent this
>     > /etc/alternative mess?
>     > it is cause so many things to not work, many seem to be disabled
>     and links
>     > to non existent files.
>     > Please, I'm not interested in fixing the alternatives stuff, I
>     would like to
>     > know if it can be removed completely so installed softwares work
>     as they
>     > should.
>     >
>     > I run Hardy and decided to use a 21st century version of aMSN
>     and not the
>     > old rubbish we have to put up with, I removed amsn and
>     amsn-data, I built
>     > the new aMSN, and run make deb, install with dpkg, all good,
>     until I try run
>     > and it complain about wish (I create symlink so amsn now good) ,
>     this is
>     > just one of many things I find not work, so decide alternatives
>     has to go
>     > because I have better things to do then recreate a lot of symlinks.
>     >
>     > ciao Eddie
>     >
>     >
>            I looked and Ubuntu Jaunty does have a /etc/alternatives but
>     in all the time I have had Jaunty I had no reason to look at
>     the directory. It has a lot of stuff for sure. I have Hardy
>     too. Also never ever looked at that. How did YOU manage to
>     screw it up?
>
>     73 Karl
>
>
> I screwed nothing up, I did not like the very old versions of lynx, 
> and amsn, so i used synaptic to completely remove them, then i 
> installed the source for lynx, and built amsn using make deb, so 
> ubuntu screwed up
>  by not removing whatever it wants in /etc/alternatives given I used 
> complete remove option.

Yes you did. This is how Ubuntu was built and you will find the same I 
suspect in other distributions that are more recent.

You should have built your new amsn according to the layout the Ubuntu 
amsn package uses and then upgrade or done a source compile installation 
into /opt and adjusted the symlinks accordingly in /etc/alternatives.

>
> Also java wont run, and I never touched anything to do with that one!


Others do not have a problem with Java except maybe getting a 64-bit 
plugin that some websites are happy with and that is solved without 
breaking the alternatives system.