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Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:58:59 -0400
From: Charles Wilson <cygwin AT cwilson DOT fastmail DOT fm>
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Subject: Re: [Attn: alternatives maintainer] - ghostscript preremove breakage
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Dr. Volker Zell wrote:

> What does this
> 
>  path to alternate expected in /var/lib/alternatives/gs
> 
> mean ?

Some sort of parsing error. At that line in the code, the program 
expects that the line contains exactly an absolute path to the target 
program.

e.g.
   line = parseLine(&bufp);
   while (line && *line) {
     set->alts = realloc(set->alts, (set->numAlts + 1) * 
sizeof(*set->alts));

     if (*line != '/') {
       PARANOID_FREE(buf);
       fprintf(stderr, _("path to alternate expected in %s\n"), path);
       return 1;\
     }
     ...

So, line does not start with '/'. So, it's either somehow in the wrong 
state when parsing that particular line, or the line has a relative path 
or something.  What you did not post, was your actual, problematic 
/var/lib/alternatives/gs file...

FWIW, I can't reproduce this. I even tried mounting 
/var/lib/alternatives in text mode to see if that was the problem. It 
wasn't.

Here is what gs SHOULD look like, if you have both ghostscript and 
ghostscript-x11 installed:

------ snip -------
auto
/usr/bin/gs

/usr/bin/gs-native
10
/usr/bin/gs-x11
20
------ snip ------

--
Chuck

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