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