Re: news item: Introduction of app-alternatives/coreutils

On Sun, 22 Mar 2026 at 14:32, Ulrich Müller <[email protected]> wrote:
> [Why have you dropped gentoo-dev from CC?]

That wasn't intended. Not sure why gmail doesn't "reply all" to your
email, thankfully it seems all my other replies today were in-list.

> > The main argument against virtual+blocker is that we want to keep both
> > packages co-installable.
>
> Entirely possible with a virtual. Have uu-coreutils install the programs
> with prefixed names, and only install the generic names with some USE
> flag. That same flag would also be a USE-conditional for the blocker
> against coreutils.

Fair enough, you could do it that way.  It means that you need to
compile two packages when you want to switch, compared to merging
app-alternatives which takes only a few seconds.

I don't see the advantage. Do you have an example in tree of virtual
used like this ? The kill/hostname USE come close, but they don't
allow co-installation. The app-alternatives scheme works well, and
FWIW it wasn't my idea but was suggested/acked by Peter Levine, Mike
Gilbert and Sam James in the original bug.