Re: 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 07:36:48PM -0700, Don Armstrong a écrit :
>
> Perhaps it'd be useful for continued discussion if specific examples
> of packages and executables hwich are installed to a system PATH which
> you've needed to rename would help work through this.
Here is a related but not completely fitting example (this is why I have not
CCed the bug report, to avoid any later misunderstanding):
The emboss package had programs renamed because of a filename conflict with the
packages cons and pscan (a better reason to rename, even if I wished we could
find a more powerful way to resolve those conflicts). The bioperl-run provides
a BioPerl wrapper for the EMBOSS programs. The new upstream release have better
regression tests. They fail because the EMBOSS programs are expected to be
found under their upstream in /usr/bin, but in Debian they are in
/usr/lib/emboss. This strongly suggests that the current bioperl-run package in
Debian is also broken, but that was not detected before.
This example shows how difficult it can be to detect breakages when we rename
programs.
To fix bioperl-run will require a not neglectable quantity of work, compared to
the number of other package upgrades that I could do instead. This is the work
overhead I would like to avoid, not to mention the discovery of breakages
monthes after having performed an upload. All this workload has to be balanced
with the gain for users. In that case, they can use cons, pscan and emboss at
the same time. Given the difficulty to poll our package users (one thing on
which somebody with time, skills and creativity could earn a considerable
amount of kudos), I do not even know if this is appreciated.
Forgive me to close the discussion, but I would prefer not to drift further on
renamings caused by name conflicts, as I already spent much time in this
discussion. Nevertheless, I hope that the above example was interesting for you.
Have a nice day.
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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