Agreeable simplicity in computing

[mtbc]

On the Debian system that I use at work I wanted my x-www-browser and similar to point to /usr/bin/firefox. update-alternatives complained that Firefox wasn't registered as an alternative and resisted my naively attempting to fix that. The manual page didn't make it obvious how update-alternatives works nor how to placate it but I was still able to manually create the symlink in /etc/alternatives/. I highly value being able to easily manage such behaviors especially as many Unix-like systems progress away from keeping the underlying details penetrable.

Comments

[damerell]

Odd. Mine points to /usr/bin/firefox-esr & "update-alternatives --display x-www-browser" lists it as expected...

[mtbc]

That is interesting. I do have the firefox-esr package installed. No variety of Firefox was listed as an alternative.