Re: software suites (was: Adding own Software?)
On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 11:47:30AM +1000, Vincent McIntyre wrote:
> I'm talking here about largeish software packages, which have a lot
> of "task" programs that perform specific processing steps (usually
> under a lot of assumptions about their runtime environment).
> I call them software suites, to keep the distinction from .debs
> (what most people here mean by "packages", yes?).
>
> The main problem that suites pose is that the individual tasks usually
> have short names that frequently clash with names of existing programs
> in /usr/bin. There is also the bsd-ish argument that /usr/bin is for
> "system" software that potentially everyone on the system will use,
> while a given specialised software suite will be used by only a small
> fraction of users. Implicit in my thinking here is that the software
> will get installed on multiuser systems, not just systems where there
> is one user who has root access and can customise the list of installed
> software at will.
You could hack the Makefile to prepend all the binaries with some small
prefix, like foo-file, foo-find, foo-whatever, so that it does not clash
with the regular ones.
If those small programs/scripts are typically not executed interactively
by a user, you could also but them into /usr/lib/<package> and modify
the calling program accordingly, by adjusting its run-time $PATH e.g.
Michael
--
Michael Banck
Debian Developer
mbanck@debian.org
http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html
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