Package: imagemagick Version: 8:6.9.7.4+dfsg-11+deb9u5 Severity: normal Tags: upstream
Dear Maintainer, Bash has flexible similarity between scripts and the REPL/command shell. Enhancing the shell requires choosing and using a name - a name identifies a command, program, script (file), function, alias or variable (etc). Newer ImageMagick (IM) versions provide the command "magick" which has the traditional IM commands as subcommands of this "magick" command, e.g. magick convert ... magick import ... This is similar to the way Git and other ("relatively modern") programs are structured. IM's "import" command, when in the global PATH at /usr/bin, dominates this namespace - i.e. the name "import" gets in the way of using the word "import" for other purposes, for example in the project I am gestating, enhancing Bash to provide for import of modules, and in this case the name "import" is the natural name for this function. Now XFCE (my desktop) seems to want ImageMagick (perhaps for its printing subsystem), and so the program name "import" gets in the way of this little project I'm developing - especially when trying to debug a problem, and when for some reason I have an "import module" problem, IM's import program first baffles, then gets in the way, and finally, seems to dump random files around the place. It seems the name "import" is merely a symlink to the actual program in "alternatives", which provides for removing the /usr/bin/import link using update-alternatives, however as the update-alternatives man page says, the "generic name" is meant to choose one of the corresponding "files providing interchangeable functionality", and so the obvious problem is other packages (e.g. the XFCE printing (cups?) subsystem) depending on "/usr/bin/import" rather than on say /usr/bin/import-im6.q16 - so I don't know if there are such dependencies, but if there are, then a transition period is required to wean the reverse dependencies of ImageMagick off of the generic "PATH" names such as import, identify and display, and onto the "/usr/bin/magick import" etc. - thus this bug report/ feature request. Philosophically, programs (such as IM) ought not dominate the top level program name space, especially for the more generic names including the examples given above - by avoiding such namespace domination, greater room is provided to future hackers to tinker and expand their systems in ways we have not yet thought of. -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.5 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-7-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_zen.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_zen.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_zen.UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_zen.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_zen.UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages imagemagick depends on: ii imagemagick-6.q16 8:6.9.7.4+dfsg-11+deb9u5 imagemagick recommends no packages. imagemagick suggests no packages.