Re: New pacakge containing binaries with same name as some from the packages cons, pscan and hsffig.
Le Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 03:47:28PM +0200, Andreas Tille a écrit :
>
> Well, I do not know the other packages and thus I do not really know
> whether it is really acceptable. There are a lot of choices - just
> pick a reasonable one:
>
> 1. Ask upstream to use em_* names - or rename all binaries according
> to this (probably not reasonable because users own scripts will
> fail.
> 2. Use the wrapper method like PhyLip packae does.
> 3. Consult popularity contest results for the packages that cause
> the name space polution and ask the maintainers / upstream
> authors whether they see a chance for a rename.
> 4. If popularity contest result fr the other packages is low
> your suggested conflicts solution might be acceptable
> 5. Use diversions and just divert the other packages names. This
> might be a little bit dangerous if you find no reasonable way
> to inform users about the fact that the other programs might be
> renamed and you have to make sure that the other packages will
> not break terrribly.
Dear all,
I agree with Andreas that that kind of situation is likely to happen
more and more: I understand that people who use frequently a pacakge
want short names. But let us look at the bright side of the problem:
binary conflicts happen more often in Debian because we have more
packages, so it pushes us ahead and gives us an opportunity to innovate
first.
In the following proposal, I try to combine the best of each points
proposed by Andreas with some idea of mine to involve CDDs in the
process.
* By shipping the binaries in /usr/lib/package, we give the final choice
to the user, who can add this on the top of his PATH in order to have a
direct access to the programs, without wrappers.
* As we are dealing with packages with a low popularity. I think that
the proposed solution should work as usual when only one package is
installed.
* There should be a way in which when aptitude installing one of the
competing packages, the user can be sure that the /usr/bin commands
will point to his favorite program. How about delegating this role to
Custom Debian Distributions ? For instance, EMBOSS is packaged for
Debian-Med. It would be great that when the med-common package is
installed, the /usr/bin programs would be the EMBOSS ones.
All of this calls for having a common wrapper between a pair of packages
competing for the same binary name, but I do not know how to implement
this if we do not want to introduce a third package. Maybe we could ship
the same wrapper in each package, and divert it to avoid conflict
between the two copies ?
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
http://charles.plessy.org
Wako, Saitama, Japan
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