On 22/11/2007, Tim Bray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Nov 22, 2007, at 9:01 PM, Shawn Walker wrote: > > > I expect to seem them because that is the standard Sun has set forth > > for package naming. > > > > Whether you think they "obtrusive, ugly, or whatever" is a subjective, > > personal opinion. > > > > The perceived benefit they currently provide is: > > Well, the perceived cost is that I will *never* be able to say "pkg > install php5", I'll have to know where it comes from. On Debian/ > Ubuntu, I can just guess and it works half the time. > > But it doesn't seem like a big deal. -T
That perceived cost depends on two assumptions you may be making: 1) That the package tool isn't smart enough to do partial matches and offer to install the only match found automatically (which I would expect it to do regardless of the SUNW, SFE, or whatever) 2) That Sun won't change their packaging guidelines and that you'll be forced to do this So, perhaps a more productive way to frame this discussion, is to not focus on a particular dislike of package prefix characters. The reason being that this is a result of current packaging guidelines and not a technical limitation of the software. So, to reflect that, let's shift the discussion away from the Imagine prototype specifically towards a more general target. The first is, when a user is searching for or installing a package, what expectations do they have in regards to how the system matches their input? Ignore the prefix situation completely for the moment. Remember that since users may be fetching software from multiple repositories there are a number of possibilities. For example. pkg install php5 ...will only work if all repositories choose to call it php5, which may seem logical to you, but can't be guaranteed. What if the user has many different repositories that all offer php5 but have chosen their own system of package naming, such as: php5 php-zend-5 php-5 php-five php5.0.1 superphp5 zendphp-5 maximusphp5 When you, as a user, type: pkg install php5 ...which one do you expect it to pick? I would expect: php5 php5.0.1 maximusphp5 ...to all be possible matches depending on which ones were available to me. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor..." --Larry Wall _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
