On Thu, Sep 23, Manfred Schwarb wrote:
Am 21.09.21 um 10:47 schrieb Manfred Schwarb:
Am 21.09.21 um 09:47 schrieb Danilo Spinella:
libalternatives is imho a big improvement over update-alternatives.
But the question remains: what about performance? If I have a small program that is called in a loop, is performance severely hampered?
I.e. how does the following a=`cat <<EOF for ((i=0; i<10000; ++i)); do awk 'BEGIN { print "hallo" }' done EOF` #> time -c "$a" >/dev/null
perform with libalternatives in contrast to /usr/bin/gawk?
BTW: Is mawk really considered a full-fledged alternative to gawk? mawk has not got any real feature development since 2010, and is only kept alive since then by Tom Dickey. It misses utf8 support as far as I know.
So I would vote to rip out alternative support from gawk and mawk, declaring gawk as the default "awk" for openSUSE. I would even volounteer to write SR's to do so, if it is deemed viable/acceptable.
Thoughts?
I'm not sure if mawk is the only alternative, but if yes, I would say go ahead. Thorsten
Is there any plan to upstream its support? I think the Open Source ecosystem would greatly benefit from doing so and we wouldn't have to maintain libalternatives support for the packages. Plus, I am a big fan of upstreaming and letting the spec file just run make && make install.
Let me know if you need any help regarding this.
Regards, Danilo
On Mon, 2021-09-20 at 09:19 +0200, Stefan Schubert wrote:
Hi,
most of you are already familiar with the usage of update- alternatives. Update-alternatives, at its core, is a symlink management system. This system is then mostly used as means for administrators of a system to select a default application. For example, if we have vim or emacs installed, the admin can then make one accessible as an editor application. Update-alternatives manages these tasks by symbolic file links which has worked out, that it could become quite instable in older updated systems. Adam Majer has established a new concept how to handle the update-alternatives tasks: libalternatives Libalternatives does not use file links anymore but little configuration files which is much more stable and quite easy to handle by the administrator. Have a look to https://github.com/openSUSE/libalternatives for more information. One additional benefit of libalternatives is that it does not create entries in the /etc directory anymore. In the future the /etc directory will be used for entries/changes ONLY which have been done by the administrator and do not belong to packages or have been created by package installation.
I have already switched about 40 packages to the new libalternatives which we need around MicroOS and have submitted it to factory.
This list includes a lot of python packages. Python packages are using nice RPM macros for handling update-alternatives stuff. Currently the fixes are made manually in the spec files and it will not be done by macros anymore. I have done this step at first in order to get a feeling what is needed for using/updating these macros at first. Now I will patch the alternatives macros or will write new one in order to simplify it again. And yes, I will update the regarding python packages again. So please, do not panic :-)
Please inform us if you have any comments, suggestions or even doubts.
Greetings Stefan
-- ********************************************************************* ********** Stefan Schubert e-mail: schubi@suse.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH Maxfeldstr. 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany
(HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Geschäftsführer: Felix Imendörffer
-- Thorsten Kukuk, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Architect SLES & MicroOS SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nuernberg, Germany Managing Director: Felix Imendoerffer (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg)