Re: Proposing to appeal to the tech. comittee about language extensions in scripts.
Le 4/27/12 11:01 AM, Charles Plessy a écrit :
> 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 personally agree with this.
Renaming causes many issues when multiple programs/scripts are calling
each others and we need to patch a lot the scripts to match this.
Furthermore it is quite complex to test that renaming as no impact on
large packages.
Olivier
>
> I would like to know people's feeling about this.
>
> Cheers,
>
--
Olivier Sallou
IRISA / University of Rennes 1
Campus de Beaulieu, 35000 RENNES - FRANCE
Tel: 02.99.84.71.95
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