Comment 17 for bug 991493

Well, a major downside of not providing alternatives is that installing only llvm-3.2 (say) doesn't make it possible to compile and run 3rd-party LLVM-based software without substantial tweaking. We have modified configure script specially for Ubuntu/Debian to look for llvm-config-3.2 and llvm-config-3.1 in addition to llvm-config. However, we also need to invoke llvm-link and possibly other llvm binaries at runtime, and this is a lot trickier. It seems silly to write special hacks just to make things work out of the box on Debian/Ubuntu.

Please, just provide alternatives. There're no real reasons to not use them, besides "I don't want to". For most users, installing llvm-3.2 and actually getting llvm-3.2 that works out of the box would be quite useful, I reckon.

To quote from http://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives: The Debian alternatives system creates a way for several programs that fulfill the same or similar functions to be listed as alternative implementations that are installed simultaneously but with one particular implementation designated as the default.