Conflicting filenames in upstream packages

[Toshio Kuratomi]

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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