On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Charles Plessy wrote:
I think that I would like the Debian Blend distributions (formerly called CDDs) to manage this smartly in the future. We could have some mechanisms that make sure that for biologists, plink relates to SNPs, not to SSH. But this is a long term goal with no implementation plan.
Well, an implementation plan could be to symlink any binary to a /usr/share/blends/<blendname>/bin directory and adjust PATH for those users who are registered as user of this blend - so I see no problem in principle to realise this idea. But I'm absolutely not happy about such kind of workarounds. As I explained earlier it is also about name space polution in the Free Software namespace - it makes no sense to find a Debian specific or a Blend specific solution and should be avoided in general.
If we are confident that the user sets of plink and putty are mutually exclusive,
We can and should not be confident about this - neither in this specific case nor in general.
I would not mind a Conflict even if it is not allowed by the Policy. But how confident are we that we will not get complains? We will be in a much worse situation if we have to make changes after our userbase is established.
Yes - that's why we should also care for users which are not yet users of Debian - finally they will all use Debian once we reached world domination. ;-)
I personnaly would advocate d) because it can be the basis for a more global solution later. For instance something like /usr/lib/debian-med/plink -> /usr/lib/plink/plink, and populating /usr/lib/debian-med/ with our other cases of namespace pollutors-polluted programs. We could then ask our users to put /usr/lib/debian-med/ in their paths, so that they do not have to micromanage such issues.
Something like this as I mentioned above. The per package /usr/lib solution is just established and accepted but only a Debian specific workaround.
Lastly, Upstream was very responsive; we probably should discuss again with him.
Pointing upstream to the mails collected inside the bug page might be reasonable to understand all arguments. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]