Re: New package containing binaries with same name as some from the packages cons, pscan and hsffig.
Le Mon, May 28, 2007 at 08:36:05AM -0700, H. S. Teoh a écrit :
> On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 11:15:31PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> > Dear Hwei, Uwe and John,
> >
> > I did not manage to contact you in private (see below), therefore by
> > policy 10.1 I have to move the discussion on debian-devel (copy sent
> > to debian-med). We (the members of the pkg-emboss project on Alioth)
> > have uploaded a new package in the experimental section of Debian,
> > emboss, which provides binary program with similar names as your
> > packages.
>
> Actually, there were two replies to your original email, which raises
> some concerns over the possible approaches you raised. I did receive
> those emails, but did not reply because I didn't have anything further
> to add at the time.
Dear Hwei,
thank you for your answer. I am sorry that I was unclear in my emails: I
was actually waiting a bit more than one month for answers ...
Also, I am not saying that packages having conflicting binaries should
be removed, just that packages having serious bugs and no answer from
the maintainer for a dozen of weeks should be orphaned and either
adopted or removed.
The way to deal with trivial binary names is indeed challenging and we
did not find a good solution for the problem, especially if we want to
provide an abstraction layer to the user. For instance, with Debconf, I
do not think that we can manipulate the PATH of users which are not yet
created, and in the case of EMBOSS, a command line suite of programs, it
is likely to be a limitation.
I proposed two ideas in the past discussion, mostly for the sake of it,
but I admit they are not very convincing:
- having the two packages which contain conflicting binaries shipping
the same wrapper.
- detecting some strong cues for the interest for one package, such as
the use of a particular CDD, and try to change the binary names
accordingly.
In our particular case, in which we have not many users, and apparently
non-overlapping userbases, another problem is that any solution is
likely to annoy 99.9 % of the users and help 0.1 %... which is not
interesting now that we have less than 100 users !
Anyway, for the moment my plan is to implement the /usr/lib workaround,
and submit serious bugs next week to pscan and hsffig if I do not get
answer...
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
http://charles.plessy.org
Wako, Saitama, Japan
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