Re: About renaming scripts to remove suffixes.
On 09/26/2011 12:07 PM, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Le Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 11:31:15AM +0200, Luca Capello a écrit :
>> Given that ncbi-blast+ provides a 'legacy_blast' script without the .pl
>> extension, the ncbi-blast+-legacy package should reflect that.
> Dear all,
>
> I would like to take the opportunity of this bug report, to say again that I
> find that the Debian-specific practice of systematically removing the .pl and
> similar suffixes is actually damaging.
>
> In my work environment, it makes my scripts and my documentations incompatible
> with everybody else using other *nix systems, that is, most of my colleagues.
+1
> Discussion in http://bugs.debian.org/190753 underlines that the aim of this
> Policy recommendation is programs whose name is an interface, that is, whose
> functions are standardised and where it is common to find multiple
> implementations in different languages. In the pacakges distributed by the
> Debian Med team this is rarely the case.
I completely agree that we should possibly persuade upstream to
follow our policy. But we should IMHO not change such things
ourselves. Our priority should be on the exchange with other
scientists. I am a bit more extreme here and also risk to have
packages conflicting as with the plink example, where putty's
tool and the plink have the same name (which the went into the
distro as p-link ... wasn't me :) ).
Whatever may be used in a publicly shared script should not be renamed.
The error that may cause, say again because another package uses the
same name, may be difficult to spot and lead to irreproducible results.
Thank you, Charles, for bringing this up.
Steffen
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