[tex4ht] Collision of /usr/bin/ht with HT Editor

[Alexey Torkhov]

Hi.

Tex4HT provides 'ht' script that gets installed into /usr/bin/ht by most
linux distributions. But, there also exists so called HT Editor, which is
hexeditor with disassembler - http://hte.sourceforge.net (yes, they have
hte in hostname, but distribute themselves as 'ht' binary). So, here comes
the conflict :) This conflict happened in linux distributions before and
was resolved differently:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=128188 - in Debian, 'ht'
binary from ht package was renamed 'hte',
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=727939 - in OpenSuSE ht and
tex4ht packages made to conflict each other,
in Fedora before previous release 'ht' binary from tex4ht was renamed to
'tex4ht-ht', now packages are conflicting.
Probably, userbase of Tex4HT and HT Editor are not overlapping, so it
wasn't gotten any other attention.

So, in quest to make world more perfect :) there is the question: could
ht.sh/ht script be renamed in Tex4HT upstream, or maybe it wasn't supposed
to be exposed to enduser at all, etc? Or solution should be seeked
elsewhere? I've seen it get mentions in mk4ht script, some documentation
and Makefiles.

Alexey

Re: [tex4ht] Collision of /usr/bin/ht with HT Editor

[Karl Berry]

Hi Alexey - 

I'm sympathetic to the problem but don't see a good solution from this
side.  The ht executable has been since the beginning of tex4ht -- 15
years or so.  I don't want to remove it now at this late date.  If Eitan
had asked me in 1999 I would have told him no two-letter names, but he
didn't :).  (Ditto the HT Editor people -- any project thinking it can
use a two-letter command name at this point in Unix's history is, IMHO,
just plain wrong.)

What distros choose to do is not up to me, but I don't want to remove ht
from TeX Live.

(CVR, if you have any ideas on this, of course please let me know.)

Best,
karl