Got any more details about skip alternatives? I'm a bit out of touch with this bit of Java

When using OS packages, they typically already set up the alternatives for you, and usually with followers (aka slaves in some versions of update-alternatives) instead of separate configurations for each binary. And if you then add configs for those followers, bad things happen. On suse, you get errors (which is why I removed some binaries from the list for that platform). On redhat, it doesn't error, but it sometimes creates a broken config where the file exists in /var/lib/alternatives but the symlinks aren't made. But not always! I haven't been able to figure out the exact conditions to reproduce it but definitely doesn't happen if you remove the follower from the Java config first.

The most correct thing to do would probably be to add followers to the java config instead of making separate items on the platforms where this is supported, but I think the choice made to do individual configs was to avoid having to maintain each platform's idiosyncrasies. So, the next best option imo is to allow users to skip the creation of the derived java_alternatives resources so they can use the OS package defaults or manage it themselves, either with their own java_alternatives resources or something else. (Since resources defined by another resource live in their own child context it's not trivial to just edit_resource etc to make changes or set the action to :nothing).