As far as I understand, /etc/alternatives
stores only currently selected alternatives. Where are all the variants and all the metadata stored? I have accidentally removed an alternative with galternatives
and want to add it back as it was manually (as galternatives
functionality is very limited).
2 Answers
This data seems to be in /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives, also check man update-alternatives for more information.
The command-line update-alternatives
tool should help you here.
This command should take you through all alternatives one at a time:
update-alternatives --all
There are some more examples at this wiki page which can show you all manually-set alternatives and even (use with caution!) reset all those to their defaults.
A more detailed description of how the alternatives system works, including where it stores all its configuration, is available in the update-alternatives manpage (note that this version for Debian and Ubuntu contains more functionality than the update-alternatives from redhat).