Hi Charles, Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> wrote: > Here, both programs have narrow and non-overlaping user bases, and are > not installed on fresh standard Debian systems. > > This said, you made a good point that one has to consider if programs > can be accidentally called with root priviledges, and what will > happen in that case. > > I think that it would be a good element for a checklist, rather than > a good reason to forbid any name conflict at all. > > We also have to consider that large multi-user, multi-purpose systems > are becoming rare because it is easier to have virtual servers, > chroots, and other container solutions. To the practical possibility > of needing both programs at the same time is even lower than when the > Policy was written. > > Here the surprise would come only if there were a system that is set > up for both the purpose of bioinformatics and security port scanning, > without the users being aware that there can be one or the other > alternative installed. I think that it is very unlikely. Note that another use case, which will produce conflicts even if neither package is installed is searching for a particular binary. Say, I want to install the bioinformatics tool, and search for it using: $ apt-file search bin/amap if this search returns multiple packages providing bin/amap, I will be a bit confused. Maybe I even think both would fit my purpose and will install one randomly; however, I guess I will also be confused if this search turns up /usr/bin/amap-bio and /usr/bin/amap-pt and no /usr/bin/amap, so renaming does not necessarily help for this. So while this is not really a point supporting always forbidding common binary names, I just wanted to point out that two packages do not need to be installed in order for their binary names to clash and archive-wide operations such as apt-file have to be considered as well. Cheers, Mika --
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