[pacman-dev] Alternatives system brainstorm

[Eli Schwartz]

On 10/28/19 9:29 AM, Daan van Rossum wrote:
> * on Monday, 2019-10-28 23:08 +1000, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>>>  I imagine there may be exceptional situations where the extra power will be nice to have in the future.
>>
>> Do you have a plausible example where a list of symlinks is not enough?
> 
> # pacman -Fl lua lua52 | grep include
> lua usr/include/
> lua usr/include/lauxlib.h
> lua usr/include/lua.h
> lua usr/include/lua.hpp
> lua usr/include/luaconf.h
> lua usr/include/lualib.h
> lua52 usr/include/
> lua52 usr/include/lua5.2/
> lua52 usr/include/lua5.2/lauxlib.h
> lua52 usr/include/lua5.2/lua.h
> lua52 usr/include/lua5.2/lua.hpp
> lua52 usr/include/lua5.2/luaconf.h
> lua52 usr/include/lua5.2/lualib.h
> 
> Each of the lua header files lives in /usr/include.  A function can symlink all files in a directory using wildcards.  Would you not need at least some form of wildcard support in a list of key-value pairs?

I'd argue it is incorrectly packaged, then. They should live in
/usr/include/lua/ which would be a directory symlink. I'm admittedly not
sure how to maintain the ability to include from /usr/include without
additional symlinks that have no package to be packaged in...

But if we needed wildcard support for only a subset of files in that
directory, then we could use bash wildcards to generate a bunch of
different alternatives, and link them together as a single group. This
is already something we want, because we want to change the symlink for
/usr/bin/lua at the same time anyway.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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