Re: renamings to remove extensions

["George Danchev" <danchev@spnet.net>]

Quoting "Josselin Mouette" <joss@debian.org>:

> Le mardi 29 septembre 2009 à 11:43 +0200, Mike Hommey a écrit :
> > Improving quality only for the sake of it is not necessarily a good
> > idea. I do agree that if everyone but Debian expects foo to be called
> > as foo.pl, there is a bug in Debian.
>
> Which is why lintian warnings are left at the appreciation of the
> maintainer.
>
> Renaming binaries in a way that breaks interfaces or expectations is not
> desirable, of course. That doesn’t prevent the goal of removing useless
> script extensions from being a worthy one.
>
> The idea of putting extensions in scripts is stupid; it denotes a lack
> of understanding of the Unix way, and makes it harder to make them
> evolve in the future. Which is why we should remove these extensions
> when possible, and ask upstream to do so when it is not.

I've also read people claiming that preserving extensions could  
actually help evolving and migrations in the future and it is as  
simple as app.lang1 being rewritten as app.lang2, both stay on board  
as needed or for a reasonable amount of time, then at some point  
app.lang1 could actually be changed to just call app.lang2 when it's  
considered mature enough. That is absolutely fine with me as long as  
app.* are kept in reasonable amount of disk space, but scripts usually  
don't tend to become that large. (even small sizes could not be that  
practical for embedded when doubled, but that is another story).