[Pkg-tcltk-devel] Debian Tcl/Tk packages: get rid of alternatives

[Sergei Golovan]

Hi and thanks for the input!

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 8:48 PM,  <tomas at tuxteam.de> wrote:
> Totally non-authoritative user opinion here: to me it makes sense:
> scripts should state dependency on the interpreter/lib version
> explicitly anyway (and Tcl has a mechanism for that), user from the
> command line will get some sensible default via symlink.
>
> The only downside I see is the access to the "right" man pages:
> the alternatives mechanism provides an elegant way to do that
> (whenever my default is tcl X.Y I'll "see" tcl X.Y's man pages).

In fact, we don't use alternatives for manpages (only for tclsh.1 and
wish.1). All tcl*-doc (or tk*-doc) packages are conflicting with each
other, and tcl-doc recommends (not depends to make it possible to
install any, only one though, desired doc version) the default docs
version.

>
> Is there any other way to achieve that? How does Python do that?
> (Maybe Python doesn't rely that much on man, its culture being
> much less unixy).

AFAIK, python uses HTML documentation, and just a few manpages for
utilities in section 1 (for which there're symlinks in the python and
python-minimal packages).

Cheers!
--
Sergei Golovan