Re: Decision on leaving upstream tar files untouched?
> So there's no real provision for having a pacakge who's name is
> different from the upstream name (perhaps just a bad idea anyway).
> The reason I bring this up is that I'm packaging RScheme whose
> upstream tarfile is named rs-version.tar.gz, while I was thinking of
> naming the Debian package "rscheme" to reflect the actual name of the
> project/program.
Consistancy is a pretty good reason. There is just something comforting
about looking for package source and knowing exactly what it will be
named.
> What's more, rscheme has two executables, rs and rstore. rs has the
> same name as the upstream tarfile, so it's the one someone who
> installs a package named "rs" would me most likely to run, but it's
> not generally the one you should be running. Normally you would run
> rstore. They are similar, but rstore has more functionality.
> Considering these issues, I was going to name the package rscheme, and
> provide a link from /usr/bin/rscheme to /usr/bin/rstore.
>
> Bad idea?
I think it is a good idea. I've been discouraging very-short package
names because they are meaningless without prior experience. Admittedly,
"rscheme" doesn't mean much to me, but it means more than "rs".
The same goes for naming command. I think the mirror package already
does this, renaming "mm" to "mirror-master"; a perfectly reasonable
thing to do especially considering that mirror-master is almost never
run by hand.
Brian
( bcwhite@verisim.com )
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