Re: Node.js and it's future in debian
Aníbal Monsalve Salazar <anibal@debian.org> writes:
> On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 07:14:04PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> In an ideal world, *neither* application would be using "node", since
>> it's a very generic name, but the reality is that people go off and do
>> things without paying attention to our naming policy and sometimes the
>> really popular ones get away with stomping on namespace just because
>> they're popular.
> Contrast that with the positive actitude of the NFS developers of CITI
> at UMichi when heimdal-dev and libgssapi-dev both contained
> /usr/lib/libgssapi.a [1]. They went to the trouble of renaming libgssapi
> to libgssglue.
Indeed, and I'm very grateful for that. But realistically that was also a
lot easier than renaming Node.js's interpreter, and I think the CITI folks
did actually know that was coming. The conflict had already been pointed
out in the Kerberos community and had been discussed prior to it coming up
here. But more significantly that library was essentially used only by
NFS, so only a few clients had to change and the renaming was fairly
straightforward.
Node.js is at this point another matter; it's the topic of books,
widespread use independent of the upstream developers, and lots of
articles and Internet documentation with a life of its own. A quick
Google search comes up with tons of indepedent sites telling people to run
programs with "node <script-name>". That makes renaming a much more
difficult prospect.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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