Bug#190753: About dropping the ‘should’ recommendation to rename binary programs using a suffix to indicate their programming language.
Le Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 06:33:53PM -0700, Don Armstrong a écrit :
>
> In the few cases where I've run into this problem, patches have been readily
> accepted upstream.
Indeed, that is the way to go, and the core of my argument is that renaming
before the patches are accepted is a deviation that wastes the time of our
users (in that case, me).
> 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.
In my understanding of Russ emails, he objects that there is no consensus for a
change, but did not object that renaming was not unappropriate.
I think that it would be better to have the CTTE take a position which is
clearly not about naming but about renaming. Something that as a maintainer I
can use to discard my responsability if I get user complaints. In particular, I
would like to hear how balanced is the risk of breaking things comparing to the
possiblity of having easier transition paths in the hypothethical case that the
program is rewritten in a different language.
I hope that everybody understands that renaming scripts opens possiblity to
introduce bugs that will only be discovered after releases. I do not want to
have my name associated to that kind of embarassement when the cause is a
Debian-specific ’enhancement’.
> 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.)
Yes, at the beginning I was solving the problem by moving the scripts to
/usr/share. But again, as a user of my own package, I was wasting my own time
at work, and stopped doing this. We all disagree that having the suffix of the
name part of an API is bad, but we have to accept the reality when it is.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
Reply to: