Comment # 5 on bug 1031133 from Marketa Calabkova

I got an answer:

I checked this yesterday, and silencing the first warning would be
trivial, the second one might need more code shuffling. But I'm
actually wondering now whether that would be the correct thing to do
at all.

The problem I can see, is that this is really dealing with a broken
alternative and symlinks, so I think the user should be notified, but
will ponder about it a bit more.

In any case ISTM that the real problem here is how u-a is being used in
SUSE, which is not how u-a expects it to be operated. I'd say you'd need
to switch to call it from %preun, which is what we are doing in Debian
(removal is executed in prerm). This makes sure the alternative gets
removed before the files disappear, so there's never a broken
alternative (making the installation more robust), and u-a never sees
that breakage as something that needs fixing, so no warnings will get
emitted.

The above is documented in the man page, I guess I could improve it to
cover the rpm case.

Thanks,
Guillem


So Debian tells us we are using update alternatives the wrong way :) .