On 2018-07-11, Greg Wooledge <wool...@eeg.ccf.org> wrote: > > What I DO NOT WANT is for the name 'prename' to go away. Because then > all the programs that call prename will fail. > > What I DO NOT WANT is for someone in Debian to tell me that I should be > calling 'rename' instead, because this is dangerous. There is a different > program named 'rename' on Red Hat systems, and it has incompatible syntax > and behavior. Calling 'prename' in a shell script is safe, because if > you run it on a Red Hat system, you get a nice friendly error message > telling you that prename isn't found, instead of some random behavior. > > Calling 'rename' in a shell script is a recipe for disaster. You can't > know what will happen. > > I figured I'd better speak up now, before we have another mailx -> s-nail > disaster at buster's release. Names of things are important. You can't > just go changing them on a whim. >
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=870472 (I guess this addresses your concern.)