[Radiance-dev] Re: Radiance in Debian

[Georg Mischler]

Thomas Bleicher wrote:

> Sorry, you've lost me there. I think the point of creating a separate
> path is to keep the established names while we're still able to have
> everything related to Radiance in one (less common) place.
>
> [...]
>
> A separate path is not 'hiding' anything. In fact this seems to be the
> most Unix/Radiance-like way of solving the problem

(Allow me to break my self-imposed curfew for a short moment)

I can really only agree with Thomas here, even if he didn't put
it quite that bluntly:

Installing a package with more than 100 executables in everybodys
/usr/bin/ is one of the most unpleasant things you can do in this
context. The standards offer the alternative of /usr/lib/<package>
exactly for this case. Adding two extra paths in an user's
environment is a trivial exercise. Remember that your target
audience are Linux users, who do this all the time.
Those people who would fail, just because they don't know how
to edit their ~/.profile or ~/.cshrc, will not be able to do
anything useful with Radiance anyway. Don't make life miserable
for the knowledgeable users because of them.

Renaming genbox, with all the contreived workarounds that have
been proposed, would only solve *our* problem *for now*. But
because we'd occupy such a large portion of the namespace in
/usr/bin/, installing there would inevitably cause more problems
for other package authors in the future. The problems it would
cause for Radiance users right now have already been mentioned.

In summary: Clogging /usr/bin/ is very bad manners. Don't do it.


(back into my cave again)

-schorsch

-- 
Georg Mischler  --  simulations developer  --  schorsch at schorsch com
+schorsch.com+  --  lighting design tools  --  http://www.schorsch.com/