On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 11:47:30AM +1000, Vincent McIntyre wrote: > I'm talking here about largeish software packages, which have a lot > of "task" programs that perform specific processing steps (usually > under a lot of assumptions about their runtime environment). > I call them software suites, to keep the distinction from .debs > (what most people here mean by "packages", yes?). > > The main problem that suites pose is that the individual tasks usually > have short names that frequently clash with names of existing programs > in /usr/bin. There is also the bsd-ish argument that /usr/bin is for > "system" software that potentially everyone on the system will use, > while a given specialised software suite will be used by only a small > fraction of users. Implicit in my thinking here is that the software > will get installed on multiuser systems, not just systems where there > is one user who has root access and can customise the list of installed > software at will.
You could hack the Makefile to prepend all the binaries with some small prefix, like foo-file, foo-find, foo-whatever, so that it does not clash with the regular ones. If those small programs/scripts are typically not executed interactively by a user, you could also but them into /usr/lib/<package> and modify the calling program accordingly, by adjusting its run-time $PATH e.g. Michael -- Michael Banck Debian Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
