Comment 10 for bug 380196

Asac, I appreciate your work on firefox and I thank you for the information you provided today. I am passing that information along to several user groups who all seem to want FireFox 3.5 NOW, lol. I wish to understand your response to this bug as it seems unclear to me.

Right now the choice of which firefox to run is made by editing the symbolic link at /usr/bin/firefox. Do you intentionally mean you will not accept a patch that implements update-alternatives? It seems you do.

The alternatives systems comes from Ubuntu's Debian heritage and is widely used and known about by users and system administrators. It is a collaborative system useful in managing symbolic links which I think is what we are talking about. Firefox is used in many desktop environments, not just Gnome, KDE and XFCE. I think this system provides a much more robust and flexible solution to this complex problem rather than forcing users to change anything in /usr/bin that is not able to be overridden for other users or purposes.

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ap-pkg-alternatives.html

From man 8 update-alternatives:

update-alternatives creates, removes, maintains and displays information about the symbolic links comprising the Debian alternatives system.

It is possible for several programs fulfilling the same or similar functions to be installed on a single system at the same time. For example, many systems have several text editors installed at once. This gives choice to the users of a system, allowing each to use a different editor, if desired, but makes it difficult for a program to make a good choice for an editor to invoke if the user has not specified a particular preference.

Debian’s alternatives system aims to solve this problem. A generic name in the filesystem is shared by all files providing interchangeable functionality. The alternatives system and the system administrator together determine which actual file is referenced by this generic name. For example, if the text editors ed(1) and nvi(1) are both installed on the system, the alternatives system will cause the generic name /usr/bin/editor to refer to /usr/bin/nvi by default. The system administrator can override this and cause it to refer to /usr/bin/ed instead, and the alternatives system will not alter this setting until explicitly requested to do so.