Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On 9/4/07, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
Has anyone considered a system that 'makes sense' for multiuser operation where different users want different alternative targets at once - or the same user wants alternative JVMs for different applications at the same time?
Are you suggesting that the alternatives system, in association with shell PATH variables isn't adequate enough for a user who knows enough about things such as sendmail alternatives to reconfigure to their hearts content?
MTA's are sort-of system wide by nature, since only one thing can be listening on the inbound port. I'm more concerned with different JVMs since it is fairly likely that some users/applications won't be satisfied with included version(s), and some apps that you might want to run at the same time require different JVM versions.
I'm pretty sure alternatives allows for per-user configurations, into per-user defined paths for executables and manpages and what not.
I haven't found documentation for the alternatives system that explains it at that level, and I haven't had a strong enough stomach to wade my way through the multi-level symlink morass to figure out what the right values for JAVA_HOME and PATH should be to execute any specific JVM version. Is it really designed to handle that?