Bug#540365: ITP: turnin-ng -- Assignment submitter and manager

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Sun, 2009-08-09 at 16:40:44 -0400, Ryan Kavanagh wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 09, 2009 at 05:23:43PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > I hope the packages uploaded won't have a «project» binary in the
> > PATH?
> 
> At the moment yes, Turnin-NG provides /usr/bin/project since that's what the
> original turnin / project app provided. However, I can either:
>  1) Rename the project script to something else upstream.
>  2) Rename it in the Debian package and add a note to README.Debian.
> 
> I'm not sure which I prefer. #1 has the advantage of being consistent across all
> distributions. #2 makes it so that if someone else wants to move away from SPARC
> and use Turnin-NG as a direct replacement for their old binaries, they can.
> 
> What do you think?

I'd rename it upstream, less troubles for everyone. It's of course
unfortunate that the original program was named like that, but I don't
think continuing to take over such generic name is good in general. You
could still document that in the Description, and README.Debian maybe
also including a recipe for sites that might want to create for example
a compat symlink under /usr/local for transitional purposes, or something
to that effect.

For the upstream part you could also do a slow transition, provide a
«project» wrapper that prints a warning on stderr notifying the user
about it being obsolete and pointing to the new name, the executing
the actual program. The wrapper could be shipped for a period of time
before complete removal, and installed only if enabled via some
configure flag (or make target, as in “make install-obsolete”). Or
just document the rename.

thanks,
guillem