Re: Bug#679547: ITP: ben -- toolbox for Debian maintainers

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 07:21:21PM +0200, Mehdi Dogguy a écrit :
> 
>  This is a collection of useful tools that Debian maintainers can use
>  to make their packaging work easier. They all work with regular
>  Debian package list files, and should be useful for Debian
>  derivatives as well. This package ships a single executable, "ben",
>  with the following subcommands:

Hi,

this looks very interesting, but I worry about future name conflicts with the
following scenario:

 - More than one project is likely to be intested for taking /usr/bin/ben
   as a program name.

 - Since Debian's ben is Debian-specific, it will not be noticed by projects
   aiming at a wider audience.

 - If such a project comes to existence and becomes popular, we will have
   another name conflict à la node.js.

An alterative scenario is that another project of narrow audience picks ben,
which will cause a conflict of lesser importance as it will be solved on the
usual first-arrived-first-served basis.  But the key point is that if we do not
aim at hundred thousands users for a tool, I think that we should avoid
three-letter names.

Have a nice week-end,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan