On Tue, 2021-09-21 at 10:06 +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

On Tuesday 2021-09-21 09:47, Danilo Spinella wrote:

...

libalternatives is imho a big improvement over update-alternatives.

Is there any plan to upstream its support?

Upstream to where? Most if not all uses of update-alternatives exist because a *distro* chose to provide two or more implementations with the same name.

/etc/alternatives/ctags exists because openSUSE wanted to ship both ctags and emacs-ctags. The emacs project in itself would not, and probably does not, care about the non-emacs-ctags variant in any way, in the scope of the upstream project.

For example it could be upstreamed for iptables and ebtables; same for util-linux, binutils, llvm. But yea, it does not apply to all projects. I still think it could be worth a try for most ones.