Proposing to appeal to the tech. comittee about language extensions in scripts.
Dear Russ, Joey, Debian Med team and evrybody,
in 2010 I discussed with you in this bug (#190753) about our policy of removing
suffixes from program names, and the harm it causes by breaking compatibilty
between Debian system using packaged programs, and other UNIX system which
installed the program from source.
This is causing frequent tensions in my packaging team, with on one hand the
members who want to respect our policy and promote best practices by proposing
a renaming a posteriori, and on the other hands the members who object changing
a program's name that does not break anything, and who would directly suffer
from such a renaming.
Much has been said, and I am not criticizing the points that have been made in
favor of renaming, nor I object to promote them to the developers at the moment
where they chose a name for their new program, but my opinion as a user of
these packages where the scripts would be renamed according to our policy
(which I do not follow anymore since a couple of years), is that the drawbacks
in terms of incompatibility with others, of transition to follow, of loss of
backward compatibility when going back on an old project, etc., are too heavy
compared to the suggested benefits.
As proposed in 2010 (http://bugs.debian.org/190753#98), I would like to ask the
Technical Comittee to reconsider our Policy, and restrict it to cases where the
name of a program is an interface (http://bugs.debian.org/190753#128).
I would like to know people's feeling about this.
Cheers,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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