juju-core in the devel ppa does not use alternatives

[Nick Moffitt]

I hear a rumour that juju-core deliberately does not use /etc/alternatives. Would it then not be preferrable for the juju-core package to use the conflicts/replaces fields to tell the package manager to uninstall the old juju package, rather than simply letting the juju-core installation fail if the old juju package is installed?

[Tom Haddon (mthaddon)]

We currently run pyJuju and juju-core environments in Prodstack while we migrate all the pyJuju environments to juju-core. If juju-core conflicted with pyJuju we wouldn't be able to do that.

[Nick Moffitt (nick-moffitt)]

It seems like /etc/alternatives is the only useful option, then.

[LaMont Jones (lamont)]

Alternatives is the only sensible option here.

[James Page (james-page)]

juju-core from the stable PPA does use alternatives; in the devel PPA it does not - this need to be fixed up.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

James, do you know what steps we can take to switch the devel ppa to being built in the same fashion as the stable ppa?

Ideally a recipe that would use the exact same steps for building the .deb package. (Even if there is a step in there that has to create or download a tarball.)

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

We can support alternatives for the next devel release. I believe http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/saucy/juju-core/saucy/files/head:/debian/ shows the proper use of juju-core.prerm.in and juju-core.postinst.in. We want to update lp~ce-orange-squad/juju-core/unstable-packaging