On 07/06/2015 10:54 AM, Jonathan Dowland wrote: > On Sun, Jul 05, 2015 at 01:16:02PM +0200, Christian Seiler wrote: >> A good example for this is the open(1) command: way back when Linux was >> still in its infancy, somebody decided it would be a good idea to have >> a command to run something on a different virtual text console, and >> they named it 'open'. This is the reason why you have 'xdg-open' for >> opening files according to their mime type (and that command is not >> that known, because of its name), because 'open' was already taken. > > On one hand, had xdg-open used "open" anyway, nothing of relevance would > actually have broken, since nobody uses the original "open" anymore. But > in 5-10 years time we might have the same situation again, when xdg-open > is obsolete. Well, the implementation could possibly be obsolete in 5-10 years, but I think the generic idea of "this command will open it's argument with some application suitable for that file" is something that transcends the current implementation. So xdg-open potentially reserving the open command is something I'd be completely fine with (had open not previously been reserved by something else), because any other sensible use of that command would IMHO entail the same type of functionality, possibly with a completely different implementation. (And that would be something the alternatives mechanism was designed for, btw.) As for xdg-open grabbing it anyway, see: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/04/msg00835.html https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=732796 Christian
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