Re: Packaging MB-System, some questions
Hi Hamish,
On Mon, Sep 02, 2013 at 05:03:53PM -0700, Hamish wrote:
> > The usual reason to move a set of binaries from /usr/bin to
> > /usr/lib/<pkg>/bin is to avoid name space conflicts. Unfortunately when
> > having such a number of binaries most probably one or to with short or
> > generic names have the same name in common with some totally inrelated
> > binary from some other package in Debian.
> With a little test-loop for the GMT binaries I don't see any conflicts:
>
> for FILE in `dpkg -L gmt | grep /usr/lib/gmt/bin/` ; do
> apt-file search /usr/bin/`basename "$FILE"`
> apt-file search /usr/sbin/`basename "$FILE"`
> echo -n "."
> done
OK, that's a reasonable check. May be some name conflict might have
existed in the past and this reason is gone now.
> But I'm not sure if that gets things like alternatives symlinks or not though. Most of the GMT bin names are pretty specialized; less than 10 seem like variations on generic words which someone else might possibly use one day. (psxy, x_list, ...)
>
> for MB-System the binaries all start with mb_* or mbm_* [macros] so less likely to have a namespace conflict.
That's a reasonable means done by upstream to use a common prefix.
> >> My current solution (which I'm not really happy with either) is
> >> to add a file to /etc/profile.d/ called gmt_path.sh containing
> >> PATH="$PATH:/usr/lib/gmt/bin"; export PATH
> ...
> > Your solution to set the PATH accordingly might be a reasonable addition
> > to the wrapper script.
>
> is it Standards legal/nice to make that happen for another package?
It is legal for sure and other packages are doing things like this (we
are maintaining phylip in Debian Med like this and there are other
examples). Name space conflicts just happen and you learn about these
quite soon because there is some automatic QA test.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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