Bug#190753: About dropping the ‘should’ recommendation to rename binary programs using a suffix to indicate their programming language.
On Tue, 06 Oct 2009, Charles Plessy wrote:
> I think that the core of the disagreement is on how frequent the
> re-implementation in a different language happen. My experience is
> that in my field, bioinformatics, it is close to zero. Moreover,
> when programs with similar function and same basename are written,
> they are most often not designed to be a 'drop-in' replacement. The
> filename extension is therefore part of the name, and removing it
> only creates problems and difficulties. I will stop to obey the the
> 'should' Policy directive, because I think that this is the right
> thing to do in my profesional environnement.
IME, the bioinformatics tools I've used tend to be written by people
with minimal experience in FOSS development;[0] as such they often
tend to do things in ways that don't properly integrate with the ways
things are done in existing FOSS distributions. Educating them and
promoting these changes upstream is an important part of stewarding
their incorporation in Debian. [In the few cases where I've run into
this problem, patches have been readily accepted upstream.]
I'd suggest reconsidering your stance, but since you're doing the
work, it's not something I'm going to push any harder about.
> If the developers who think that everybody in Debian should rename
> scripts with name suffix indicating a language have no other
> arguments to add, then indeed it is the moment to call for the
> technical commitee to take a final decision.
Changing policy without rough consensus would require a CTTE decision
on the matter. Since Russ and Manoj have both laid out their
objections to changing policy by removing the should directive, I
don't believe there is much hope in achieving rough consensus.
[Honestly, since 3/3 of the CTTE members who have commented on this[1]
have made their opinion fairly clear, I'm not sure if there's much
hope in that path either.]
> On my side, I am willing to make concessions, so a rewording of the
> should directive to explain when exceptions are acceptable could be
> an alternative. But my undertaning of a 'should' directive is that
> it would not make sense if they do not apply in most of the cases,
> which here is my point of view: the programs that the Policy wants
> me to rename do not in any way have the same scope as /bin/ls, nor
> are they as standardised and widely used enough that they could be
> called a part of a 'public API'.
If they are not standardized enough to be part of a public API, then
they do not belong in one of the directories in the system PATH, and
their name matters little. (Policy says nothing about the extensions
of executables outside of the system PATH for precisely this reason.)
If scripts are installed into the system PATH, then it's because
people who install those packages are expected to be able to make use
of them as a public API, and they should generally be treated as such.
Don Armstrong
0: Or alternatively, they're written by people like me who don't
think about other people's use of them much.
1: Possibly 3/4 or 4/4; I'm not quite sure what Steve's position is.
--
We must realize that today's Establishment is the New George III.
Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If
it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.
-- William O. Douglas _Points of Rebellion_
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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