On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 11:07:15AM -0400, Ben Armstrong wrote:
> Gahh. Let's not and say we did. For h(isto|yste)rical reasons 'kernel-'
> means linux. Why make all sorts of work (not to mention confusion
> among existing users of kernel-* packages) for such a change? Listen,
> I'm a hurd advocate, but I think leaving things the way they are is far
> less confusing than changing them. Our package namespace has always
> been managed on a first-come, first-served basis, hasn't it? Why
> should this case be any different?
Well, we can say that developer working on other kernel will choose the
name they prefer, but mine is not an advocacy issue.
I think that we all should have the will to change whenever things
changes. Debian, was once based on the Linux kernel, but now it's going
to be distributed with other kernel, because kernel does not mean Linux
(and even if we are not going to distribute windows, most of Debian is
going to work on a non UNIX kernel).
"kernel is Linux" sounds to me as mail-reader is mutt, editor is vim,
programming language is... C-- (Yes, I used a restricted version of C
for an university exam :> ) etc.
How many holy wars will start now? None, i hope: it's only an example :)
We should use names with their meaning, and not mislead users. On the
other hand we should show users the real diversity of the world we
offer: many kernels, in this case.
It's not a primary issue on the work we are doing for Debian, but i
think that a kernel-{linux,hurd,*bsd}-* namespace should be used (and
this, only because i think that the kernel- prefix would be less
confusing).
Moreover, IMHO first-come, first-served, is not the most appropriate
system to assign namespace to packages; since we have examples of this,
we have to change.
cheers,
--
Luca - De Whiskey's - De Vitis
aliases: Luca ^De [A-Z][A-Za-z\-]*[iy]'\?s$
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