Blend facilities for renamed programs.

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Dear all,

since maybe not everybody is subscribed to debian-devel, here is an extract
from a discussion about the necessary renaming of unrelated programs that are
distributed by two different packages under the same name ('plink').

Le Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 08:00:54PM +0100, Andreas Tille a écrit :
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Charles Plessy wrote:
> 
> > I think that I would like the Debian Blend distributions (formerly called CDDs)
> > to manage this smartly in the future. We could have some mechanisms that make
> > sure that for biologists, plink relates to SNPs, not to SSH. But this is a long
> > term goal with no implementation plan.
> 
> Well, an implementation plan could be to symlink any binary to a
>      /usr/share/blends/<blendname>/bin
> directory and adjust PATH for those users who are registered as
> user of this blend - so I see no problem in principle to realise
> this idea.  But I'm absolutely not happy about such kind of workarounds.
> As I explained earlier it is also about name space polution in the
> Free Software namespace - it makes no sense to find a Debian specific
> or a Blend specific solution and should be avoided in general.

Maybe we can think about it during the release cycle of Squeeze. Of course not
as a facility for upstream authors to chose too generic names, but as a
facility for the users to deal with the consequences when the mistake has been
done.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan