Attached to this mail comes a mail posted by someone to debian-devel. I think it is of interest for Gna! to keep in mind the generic name issue raised here.
Names should not be like a speed race where the one who got his "pdfviewer" released first should get this easy name forever. In other words, a gnome pdfviewer should not be called pdfviewer, but gnome-pdfviewer, gpdfviewer, or whatever, but not just pdfviewer. It does not implies anything about binaries, for us. How package are compatible each other is not a matter to us -- only to GNU/Linux distros. But names project can get at Gna! is. As such, I personally will refuse any overly generic name proposed at Gna!, and would recommands any other moderator to do so. (Most of the attached mail is irrelevant for us. The only issue for us is to refuse generic names, raising the importance of the bug #292)
--- Begin Message ---Proposal, additions to Policy and changes to dpkg: (1) Add to policy: all package names must be nongeneric [1]. (2) Add to policy: all new binary names must be nongeneric. Historical generic names ("file", &c.) are grandfathered in. Where possible, upstream packages should be patched to create nongeneric binaries (e.g., "imagemagick-display", "gnustep-viewpdf"). (3) Add /etc/friendlynames and update-friendlynames to dpkg, which works similar to /etc/alternatives except applications sharing names are not expected to provide similar functionality or accept identical arguments. (4) Heavily-favor well-established names (e.g, "display" for their traditional applications.) (5) Where possible, patch scripts to refer to the unambigious names. (6) Where difficult to find all references, do not support bugs arising from unusual remappings of friendly names. If you want to be wierd, that's on you. Benefits: * Menu launchers could have generic icons to launch "word-processor", "calculator", "graphics-editor", "contact-manager". Deep integration is not expected: just launch the app with no arguments. * All users across multiple systems have a consistent interface for making sure friendly-names are consistent. Risks: * People depend on the friendlynames in their scripts, users change them, scripts break. Mitigation: provide recommendations for friendlynames, identify names which are safe to remap, and don't support adventurous users whose system break. -- Mathieu Roy +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | General Homepage: http://yeupou.coleumes.org/ | | Computing Homepage: http://alberich.coleumes.org/ | | Not a native english speaker: | | http://stock.coleumes.org/doc.php?i=/misc-files/flawed-english | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+
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