Re: directory under /usr/bin -- Ok or not?
Le Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 09:28:19AM +0100, Luca Capello a écrit :
>
> On Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:19:26 +0100, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> >
> > Well -- that is all cool and in an ideal world I am with you on this
> > one. BUT it is often the case (e.g. with scientific software) that
> > suite provide bulk of (>100) cmdline tools. Some of those come without
> > unique names and are already widely used by people running Debian or
> > whatnot, so changing their habbits/scripts is not as easy as "lets just
> > renamed them". Sure thing we recommend upstream either coming up with
> > custom prefixes/unique names or gateway wrappers to avoid conflicts
> > and/or reduce hit on the proliferation of namespace of cmdline tools...
> > But once again -- it ain't happening at once and for all, so let's
> > not discuss this aspect further here.
>
> Exactly, discussion about this practice (which, BTW, is coded in
> Policy), was at:
>
> <http://bugs.debian.org/190753>
Hi Luca,
note that this policy is drastically biased. For instance, why foo.pl has to
be renamed and gtk-bar not ? They both convey the same message, and there is
no way to determine a priori if foo.py or qt-bar are drop-in replacements or
completely unrelated programs. I think that it is a matter of time before we
create Debian-specific conflicts that do not exist upstream.
We see more and more conflicts and it is a good thing. I think that people
have not become less careful than before, but it is just that the community of
developers increased, the quantity of Free software produced increased, and the
proportion of beginners error stays the same.
I think that we can not make the economy of supporting multiple namespaces. If
the policy on the main namespace is draconian and creates incompatiblities
between Debian and the rest of the world, then we need easy mechanisms for our
users to switch namespaces. Perhaps the Debian Pure Blends are a good tool for
this…
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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