Re: Many executables across Debian's archives share basenames
Zenaan Harkness <zenaan@freedbms.net> writes:
> Another one is "import" - should simply NEVER be a program name -
> should be reserved.
> man page: import - saves any visible window on an X server and
> outputs it as an image file. You can capture a single window, the
> entire screen, or any rectangular portion of the screen
> git does it sensibly (in the last few years) with a primary basename
> and sub commands.
import is part of ImageMagick, which is a rather old program and which
grabbed a bunch of very generic binary names. (import, resize, compare,
convert, display, and stream, for example.)
GraphicsMagick is a newer fork of ImageMagick, and it correctly does the
main command and subcommand thing with gm, but neither fork is clearly
better than the other, so people haven't done a wholesale switch.
ImageMagick is very, very widely used, so reworking it to use a saner
command model is pretty hard.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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