On 02/04/2011 10:55 AM, Andreas Tille wrote:
On Fri, Feb 04, 2011 at 08:59:37AM +0100, Alex Mestiashvili wrote:
"popt" sounds like an awfully generic name for a binary.
apt-file doesn't show that such name is in use , except libpopt which
is different thing .
Despite the fact that technically we do not have a conflict in name
space I agree with Karsten that it is at least "not nice". The question
is whether we should simply "wait" until a name space conflict might
happen at some point in time or if we rather should go with a wrapper
(as I talked about in PM with you like in the phylip package) which
somehow works around this problem. I'm unsure what might be the proper
advise here and will leave the final decision to you - just to make
you aware about the possible future conflict
In the past we had this issue with plink which compes with putty,
and was in Debian before our plink. Back then we had renamed ours,
which is truly bad for collaborations with other sites, since putty
has this mechanism to repeat past analyses. And then you truly want
to have the same binary name.
I still think we were too nice back then. We should have a policy
that scientific binaries shall not be renamed if not in conflict with
essential packages. Where there are clashes with other tools, then we
should decide if there is a common user base. If there is, then we
should have two packages. One allowing the installation in a conflict
free manner, and the other wrap that and be (exceptionally) in conflict.
Our focus should be on collaboration. Not with some other remote part
with Debian, but with the very close scientists all over the world.
My stance: no renaming. And we should fight for it more.
Many greetings
Steffen