renaming scripts provided by upstream
Hi,
I wonder about the advantages and disadvantages of renaming scripts
installed in system PATH to not include an extension as ".pl"
(Policy 10.4):
When scripts are installed into a directory in the system PATH,
the script name should not include an extension such as .sh or .pl
that denotes the scripting language currently used to implement
it.
I understand that it should not matter to the user what language is
used to implement a particular script and support omitting
extensions. But what about renaming scripts provided by upstream?
In this case renaming programs to comply with the Debian naming scheme
creates new problems:
Documentation will usually refer to upstream's naming choice and we
cannot change online documentation or mailing lists. Even changing
only the documentation provided by Debian packages may require changes
to several packages.
What if scripts (or Makefiles) try to use the program? If they are
not written on a Debian system, they will not be aware of the different
name used there. The same applies to scripts written on Debian
systems: they will not work on other systems.
Some people think that divergence should be avoided (or at least be
merged with upstream if possible)[1]. In my opinion, renaming
binaries is a far more invasive change than many other small patches
applied to Debian's packages and *should* be avoided. Of course
convincing upstream to change the name is still okay :-)
Regards,
Ansgar
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/05/msg00536.html
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