On 24/12/13 02:38, Liam R E Quin wrote: > On Sun, 2013-12-22 at 00:28 -0600, Robert Qualls wrote: >> open belongs in a separate project for high-level, >> user-facing commands that's basically just a bunch of wrappers that >> can be easily personalized by users and maintained over time.
If it uses such generic command names, then no distribution should package this (at least without renaming them); it's a namespace land-grab which fails the "would it be OK if others in my position did what I'm doing?" test. > Some GNU/Linux distributions use a parallel mechanism for > system-wide customization, update-alternatives, which uses > a /etc/alternatives/ directory and symbolic links to activate different > system components such as libraries, JVM, /usr/bin commands etc. In the distribution where update-alternatives originated (Debian), the distribution's policy is very clear about its unsuitability for groups of commands that are not at least broadly compatible. (For instance, xdg-open and gvfs-open could probably be in the same alternative group, but xdg-open and openvt can't.) > A danger in customizing shell-level commands is that shell-scripts can > become hard to debug remotely and hard to share. Yes. I would go as far as to advise: don't use single words as executable names. If you want "friendly" names for interactive use, you can use the alias functionality in your interactive shell (e.g. 'alias open=xdg-open' in ~/.bashrc would do what you want, assuming your interactive shell is bash); aliases don't work in scripts, but that's a net positive if you ever want to be able to share the script with another system. S _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list xdg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg