On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 11:27 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs(a)math.uh.edu> wrote:
I had one fresh F7 install (out of a hundred or so) where emacs was
installed but the alternatives stuff just wasn't done at all. All of
the installs were identical (all i386, same kickstart files/package
set, though the hardware itself differs wildly). I couldn't figure
out what had gone wrong, and reinstalling emacs fixed things up.
There's some sort of binary state files in /var/lib/alternatives; I
once had a problem on one of our servers where the /usr/bin/java
alternative was screwed up, and eventually traced it down to what
appeared to be corruption of that file.
I fixed it by blowing it away and reinstalling the package,
attributing it to a heisenbug, but maybe there is some sort of race or
periodic flaw in the alternatives system.