Conflicting filenames in upstream packages

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

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?

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.

> 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.

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

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
I'm still an SGML person,this newfangled /\ All one has to do is hit the
XML stuff is so ... simplistic  -- Manoj \/ right keys at the right time
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