Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 09:41:38AM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
How do other distributions deal with conflicting filenames in upstream packages? For instance, in Fedora we have coda-client and coq packaged. They both provide /usr/bin/parser.

Debian follows the guidelines that James properly reported.
Interestingly enough, the coq package in Debian ships no parser at all.
I'm not the coq maintainer, but is that executable useful at all?

The man page implies that it is intended for end-users to use... although a highly select group of end-users (Apparently, it transforms coq data into a data format speicified by INRIA).

A more generic policy we follow in Debian is to rename a priori
obviously nameclash-prone executables. For instance, the galax package
I'm maintaining ships a "webgui" executable; notwithstanding whether it
clashes or not with something else (I didn't even check), I've renamed
it to "galax-webgui" to avoid easy filename conflicts. Of course I've
suggested the change upstream which is going to implement it in next
releases.

Excellent. We don't have a formal policy like that in Fedora but most reviewers point out things like that to take to upstream. I renamed /usr/bin/migrate from the python-migrate (aka sqlalchemy-migrate) package for that reason.

If other distros have a policy of name changing, it would be nice to start a list of packages that we're doing renames to so that we could at least have consistency between ourselves.

Even more than that, I would say that all distros will benefit from a
common place where to document the choices they made in term of
executable renamings.

On one hand, when a new package is going to be introduced in a distro,
the maintainer would benefit from taking choices similar to those made
by other distro. This would ease migrating from one distro to another.

On the other hand, having an overview which shows how all distros
renamed a given executables would be an extra argument in persuading
upstream that a given naming choice was inappropriate.

Big +1 :-)

Would be a wiki page enough to get started with something like that?


http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki

Has shown a maintenance page for the past few days or I would have started this already :-( Anyone closer to the infrastructure side of things know what's going on?

-Toshio

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