Quoting Christian Kastner (2025-05-19 14:18:03)

Hi,

I have a package that ships a number of themes. I'd like to make the
default them configurable system-wide, and the alternatives system
seemed like a good fit.

However, when dh_installalternatives complains when the alternative
isn't a directory:

dh_installalternatives: error: Alternative "<somedir>" for "<somename"
in debian/<somename>.alternatives is a directory

I'm guessing that this isn't a dh_installalternatives limitation but a limitation of the underlying system bubbling up.

Is my assessment correct? If so, does anyone have a good workaround for
this? My plan B is to otherwise just manage this as a symlink in /etc/<somepackage>.

I am no expert in this, but in case you lack responses from more
knowledgeable Debian developers, you might take a look at https://debathena.mit.edu/config-packages/ and perhaps get in touch with
the developers of that project - it is not an official Debian project
but they have for many years deliberately violated the rule of not doing dpkg-divert for conffiles and might similarly mess with directories and
have experiences with what to look out for and whether it works or not
from an empiric standpoint.

- Jonas

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* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
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