commands with non standard name

[Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>]

Hello all,

Today I upgraded my potato system and found that xdvi with
Japanese support has changed its name as xdvi-ja.

I think that this might cause trouble because the basic tool
like xdvi may be called from many other applications as a
standard name, xdvi.

Perhaps it is very difficult to make every such applications
to call xdvi as xdvi-ja, i.e. different name from the standard
one.

Other Linux disributions and/or *BSD can use /usr/local/bin
for such localized commands but Debian can not do like that.

So I think it might be much better that Debian use the standard 
name even for localized commands like xdvi-ja but instead of 
putting them in /usr/bin (or /usr/X11R6/bin), put them somewhere
like /usr/bin/ja or /usr/bin/ja_JP.ujis (or /usr/X11R6/bin/ja or
/usr/X11R6/bin/ja_JP.ujis ?)

Then it is pretty simple to invoke localized command with the
standard name by setting PATH environment variable appropriately.

But, you know, the jnethack (nethack with Japanese support) is in
a quite different situation.  It is usually invoked by a user 
directly so non standard name like jnethack may cause no trouble.

So I do not think it is better to put EVERY localized commands somewhere
like /usr/bin/ja but I think it might be better that a maintainer 
can select whether to put a localized command to somewhere like /usr/bin/ja
or not.

I am not a professional on UNIX/Linux so this might be only a funny
story but as a Debian user of minor country (?) I wish to hear an 
opinion from many of you.

Thanks in advance,		1999.11.12

--
 Debian JP Developer - much more I18N of Debian
 Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>
 Department of Math., Tokushima Univ.