On 07/11/2011, at 2:20 PM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
I have to pop my head up from my lurker-hole here, and say that I'm a more than a little confused, why a 15 year old application should change its name at all? Even the Node.js wiki makes it clear that the application should be called Node.js 'to disambiguate it from other nodes' - it sounds like the developers are being proactive in notifying users that they picked a name which conflicts with other packages? I don't know about others, but I'm not overly keen on the idea of reconfiguring machines which were installed last century, because a program which appeared in the last two years has the same name.. If you think about it, node.js is *much* more 'able' to change the name of its binary - it still has an actively developed community! - I don't know about other folk, but I find it pretty darned hard to find much 'current' documentation about a lot of the older x.25 & bbs stuff I have running on some of my older boxen - one of my BBS packages doesn't even appear in a google search anymore (god help me if the wrapper I setup in 2001 to make it telnet-accessible as well as dial-in, ever breaks ;) ) Although I'm curious why both packages can't just shove a Conflicts: in for each other, and be done with it? Or just leave it as is, since they're in different directories, provided a nice big must-click-ok dialog comes up during install/upgrade to notify the user of the change? From the AX.25 side, and probably at least partly from the Node.js side, the users are going to be fairly cluey, if not accomplished hackerers - having multiple binaries of the same name, in different directories in the path is nothing new (hell, we used to rely on it on some of our hosting servers - things like reboot, shutdown, etc were wrappered with scripts in higher-preferenced directories from the PATH, to make sure accidental reboots, shutdowns, rm's etc, couldn't happen, as explicit paths had to be used.. As for scripts etc, well, if you're not specifying the absolute path to any binary you're calling, you're just asking for trouble anyway! Cheers, DG Damien Gardner Jnr VK2TDG. Dip EE. GradIEAust rendrag@rendrag.net - http://www.rendrag.net/ -- We rode on the winds of the rising storm, We ran to the sounds of thunder. We danced among the lightning bolts, and tore the world asunder |