Re: Policy §10.4 as a divergence from usptream (renamings to remove extensions like .pl and .sh).
On Tuesday 29 September 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <petere@debian.org> writes:
> > At least in cases where the programs/scripts could be considered part of
> > a programming interface, this requirement is approximately equivalent to
> > requiring the exported symbols of libraries to conform to some spelling
> > scheme. While Debian has occasionally altered or broken the exported
> > interfaces of libraries in cases of severe trouble, this is not
> > routinely done, and usually not merely in the name of prettiness.
>
> The argument for the Policy change wasn't about prettiness, but rather
> about not encoding the implementation language into the interface name.
> When the shell script named foo.sh gets rewritten into Perl, having it
> stay foo.sh or be renamed to foo.pl are both kind of broken.
>
> That may not be a good enough argument to continue this policy, but that
> was the argument for why it's now in Policy.
>
> --
> Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
I am a newcommer to this particular bit of policy, but it occurs to me that
the answer is to add links to the original commands to conform to
Debian standards while leaving the upstream commands intact. This
would then also mean that any documentation or howtos or tutorials
or blogs written around the upstream commands will still work. Otherwise
not only does Debian have to modify the commands but also all the
documentation and write its own howtos and blogs. Also somehow
we would need to subvert Google so it finds our copies for Debian users.
David
David
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