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Bug#790933: ITP: drive - Google Drive tool



On 07/05/2015 09:15 AM, Jackson Doak wrote:
> It might be possible to rename the binary and symlink "drive" to it, which
> would allow you to give the binary name over easier

Personally, I think it would be best not to reserve such a generic name
'drive' for such a specific service. There could easily be something in
the future that actually fits that generic name that now can't be used
because the name is taken by something very specific.

A good example for this is the open(1) command: way back when Linux was
still in its infancy, somebody decided it would be a good idea to have
a command to run something on a different virtual text console, and
they named it 'open'. This is the reason why you have 'xdg-open' for
opening files according to their mime type (and that command is not
that known, because of its name), because 'open' was already taken. For
an operation such as starting something on a new virtual terminal, open
is far too generic a name to have been a sensible choice even back
then, but that ship has sailed.

So _please_, please choose a different name for the binary in
Debian,[1] because accessing a cloud service (that might not be around
in 10 years, see e.g. Google News as for how such things can disappear
in a relatively short time) is something really, really specific and
really shouldn't take up a generic name that will haunt us for years to
come.

Also, _please_ don't symlink it - because then you're also reserving
the name because people are going to use it. Add a comment to the
package's README.Debian that people may add an alias to ~/.profile if
they want to use the upstream name, because then they are aware of
what they're doing.

As for the package name: they can be recycled easier than binary names,
so I don't feel quite as strongly about them, but I would also prefer
'google-drive' or similar.

Thank you.

Christian

[1] Suggestion: 'gdrive', if that's not already taken by something e.g.
GLib/Gtk+-based (I haven't checked).

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