On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 11:20:40PM -0400, Wyatt Epp wrote: > I bring this up because there are several packages with the same name > and different qualification. Obviously, they'll have different tags > because they're not the same thing, but neither should they share the > same directory. So the simple solution is to just change the package > names so we avoid collision and preserve our flat ontology (I've > forgotten the objection to doing this; please forgive).
I believe that the objection is that it is better to follow upstreams' package names as directly as possible. This would look better and be less confusing than having a package named git and git-core, like I've seen elsewhere. Having categories would also prevent changing an ebuild's name from upstream's name only for the sake of giving it a unique name in Gentoo. I think that in most cases, when package name collisions happen, the colliding packages differ enough that they'd conceivably be in different portage categories, letting them be uniquely identified in Gentoo. If someone is planning on writing a new program, he likely knows about already-existing alternatives to this package. The author of a new sound editing suite would not name his suite `sox' because the author cannot help but to know that media-sound/sox exists. But someone writing some new sax thing might play off of `sax' and name it `sox', though this is hypothetical ;-). -- binki Look out for missing or extraneous apostrophes!
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