Renaming binaries with conflicting name (Was: Re: vienna-rna is almost ready)
On Sat, Feb 05, 2011 at 06:02:40PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> I refuse to spend my time in fights were I see no chance to win and
> an obvios workaround for the conflict is avialable (see above).
I totally agree with that one.
> The time could better been spended in writing a [solution follows]
I disagree on this solution, as it seems very over-engineered and not
problem-free at all. The current practise is to place conflicting binaries
(or all) in /usr/lib/$package/bin and symlink from /usr/bin, additionally
with some note in README.Debian about the renaming and how the PATH variable
can be set to get back the original names.
Creating some sort of "science bin/ directory" is IMHO just asking for
trouble. Also, if two scientific packages create a naming conflict, what
to do then? The current solution works totally fine: If one needs the
original upstream name, the user can change their PATHs for each package.
It leaves the user in control, and that is usually best. The conflicts
are rare and the brain-dead solution scales, in the sense that only a few
users will have to carry a few extra PATHs in their ~/.$SHELLrc.
I do not agree on providing different packages as solution, conflicting and
non-conflicting. That's a maintainence burden, confuses users and (worst
of all) does not provide any benefit at all. The most reasonable approach
to me seems to do as described above and educate upstream.
As a aside, I had a look at the "modules" package a while back to deal
with that kind of problem. But it does not provide any benefit either,
it'll only clutter the namespace so people relying on modules will not be
very happy if each and every science package will add a modules config.
Best regards,
Manuel
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