On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 02:25:48PM -0400, Ben Collins wrote: > I agree. A user should not have to concern themselves about which one > they are using. If the command name is the same, they better support the > same functionality.
But they do support the same functionality, just on different formats of data file. There are plenty of cases where a user needs to be aware of which specific alternative they're using. /usr/bin/zsh can run zsh version 3 or 4, depending on alternatives. If the user is going to write a script in zsh, he better know which version he's getting, otherwise he may write code using a feature not present in the version he's running. On some level, zsh3 is incompatible with zsh4, though they both basically do the same thing. Same with the two xplot tools. > Sounds to me like you don't even want to call the package just xplot, to > avoid confusion. Maybe xplot-ng? :) Well obviously my package won't be called xplot, there's already an xplot package. But I don't want to rename the binary that gets installed by it. If we can't use alternatives to manage /usr/bin/xplot in this case, my package will simply end up conflicting with the existing xplot package, which is neither necessary nor desirable. noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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