Updating the policy for conflicting binaries names ? [was: Re: Re: New package netgen-lvs with binary /usr/bin/netgen - already taken]
Hello,
Le 08/09/2018 à 18:39, Sean Whitton a écrit :
> Hello,
>
> On Fri 07 Sep 2018 at 10:10PM +0200, Ruben Undheim wrote:
>
>> However, I think the policy gives us a lot of freedom to choose (it is not very
>> strict in this case).
>
> I don't understand. This seems pretty strict:
>
> Two different packages must not install programs with different
> functionality but with the same filenames.
>
I think the policy should be changed.
It was possible to accommodate that when the archive was a few thousand packages.
Now that it is much bigger, that floss are everywhere, packages are being forked,
we might want to update the policy to give more flexibility.
For example, in the Rust team, we have been discussing about packaging fd (a find alternative developed using rust [1]).
We are planning to install it in /usr/bin/fd .. but this conflicts with something completely different, fdclone a clone
of fd, a MS-DOS file browser...
While this is probably fun, with a declining popcon (104 today), and no upstream release since 2013,
I am not sure it is relevant to reverse the path for a leaf packages like this one.
Renaming binaries is a big pain, it is confusing for the user, making the life of the maintainer
harder, the documentations won't reflect the Debian-reality.
The wording should be changed from "must" to "should":
---
Two different packages should not install programs with different
functionality but with the same filenames.
---
and give more flexibility to maintainers.
Or am I missing a key reason for this?
Cheers,
Sylvestre
[1] https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fdclone
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