On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Anthony Towns wrote:
Steve Greenland wrote:On 12-Jun-05, 02:27 (CDT), Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org> wrote:You need to convince either git or GNU Interactive Tools to change its name upstream then. Since git is the newcomer and its name is already taken (by a GNU project no less!) perhaps you could start there.The existence of the GNU Interactive Tools was noticed when Linus picked the name 'git'. The discussion then noted that this previous use of the name was more-or-less dead upstream, and not widely used.The upstream name isn't going to change. There are probably already more users of GIT-the-VCS than GIT-the-tools. So if you rename git for Debian, we are very likely going to to be incompatible.Uh, so why hasn't the option of renaming (or just dropping) GNU Interactive Tools been discussed? Policy might require us to not have two packages installing different functionality under the same command name, but it doesn't require us to adopt "first come, first served".
It was mentioned (on the Mentors list anyways) but didn't seem to garner much support as a first-pass solution... I chaulk it up to the collective just knowing that "first come, first served" is about a fair a rule-of-thumb as we can have in this situation.
GNU Interactive Tools hasn't seen an upstream update at all since 2001, and looking at the diffs since .18, doesn't seem to have had any significant changes since 1999. The Debian updates seem mostly to be updating the build system, rather than user-visible changes.
GIT is flexible, not too bloated, not lacking anything significant or obvious, and has been that way for awhile (the command line and tools haven't changed, why should GIT)... iow, it is mature - why should that be held against it?
Popcon says: #name inst vote old recent no-files cogito 70 10 1 59 0 git 95 19 66 10 0which aiui means that 10 of 11 cogito installers use it regularly, while 19 of 85 git installers do; the "59 recent" presumably screws the stats up a bit much. See what happens when you upload your packages?
Another thing which is likely to mess up popcon based comparisons is the widely different usage patterns. GIT is a sh TUI, git-for-cogito is essentially a function call; I typically fire up GIT soon after logging in and it is useful for days-to-weeks on a single "use", by its nature git-for-cogito will see many more instances of "use" even if it is only being useful for a day.
[then again, I may completely misunderstand what popcon generates <shrug>]
Personally, I think the best solution is to leave the filesystem level error (two /usr/bin/git's) intact in the uninstalled Debian (the .debs) and present the sysadmin with the most reasonable options for resolving it when they select the affected packages. Ya, I know what that would involve to do "poperly", so I'm not suggesting it be done right now or just for this instance of the problem.
Anyways, I'm confident the collective DD's will eventually do the right thing. In the short term, I'm glad the precedent which would be set by discarding a name/path with a long and useful history is seen as worthy of argument.
- Bruce