* Christoph Berg <m...@debian.org> [220123 21:51]: > Re: Don Armstrong [..] > > Not impossible to change, of course, but an ideal transition would avoid > > breaking currently working scripts and installs. > > We were discussing the bug in last week's tech-ctte meeting, and the > gist of the discussion was that, in a ideal world, Debian would be > shipping the util-linux version as /usr/bin/rename to match what other > distributions are shipping, but that since we have been shipping the > Perl rename for the past 20 years, a proper transition would be very > hard. Especially in the light that this is an end-user tool and not > something we can control by a MBF and a lot of patches.
Yeah. I was thinking we could ship *one* release without a /usr/bin/rename at all. Not sure if that is a good idea. > Unfortunately the current defaults seem to be that we have neither, > none of my systems has any "rename" command. OTOH that might indicate > there's a head-start on a transition introducing u-l's rename as > /usr/bin/rename. > > Chris, would u-l be willing to reintroduce rename, or do you rather > want to reduce the number of commands? > > Maybe if alternatives are not the correct tool, moving the u-l rename > to a separate package, and conflicting with the perl rename is better? > (Still ugly, but the situation isn't ideal.) I believe using alternatives would introduce an RC bug. I was hoping we could put util-linux' rename into the "bsdextrautils" binary package, which has utilities like write, col, etc; to avoid putting it into an Essentials: yes package, and to avoid a new binary package. However, picking bsdextrautils seems ... maybe not ideal if it should Conflict with rename. I guess the best thing would be to introduce a new binary package, but I am out of ideas on naming it. Open for ideas here. Chris
