Christoph Berg <m...@debian.org> writes: > 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.
I understand the appeal of this for cross-distribution compatibility, but we haven't been compatible with other distributions for a very long time and there haven't seem to have been that many complaints. Even the request that set off this discussion was, if I recall correctly, only about getting access to the util-linux version, not about changing the default /usr/bin/rename. Balancing against this is the fact that the Perl rename, while a bit more complicated to use, is significantly more useful. The util-linux rename can only do simple substring replacements, not even regexes (and at least in my experience a simple s/// expression is the most common use case for rename). Neither version is a strict subset of the other (the util-linux --interactive and --symlink arguments don't appear to have equivalents in the Perl version), but the Perl version also supports -0 so that it can be used safely with find/xargs. It's unfortunate that the command-line syntax for the two programs is different in such a way as to make it impossible to merge them and write one program that supports the syntax of both. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
