[Radiance-dev] Re: Radiance in Debian

[Bernd Zeimetz]

> 
>> If you prefer to have a growing community Radiance must be attractive
>> for new users, and as easy to use as possible.
> 
> You obviously do (or did) not know who I am, so it should not
> damage your ego too much to apologize for your rudeness.

I already did that, but if it's better for your ego I'll repeat it: I'm
sorry for the rant. People who ask me to make the life for newcomers
harder than absolutely necessary just because they're knowledgeable
can't expect any respect from me. You didn't come to this world as
expert, so please don't make it harder for other people to become as
good as you are.


> I don't care if /usr/lib/<package> is really the right place
> (that's your job to figure out, what eg. about /opt/?).
> But placing very specialized packages with lots of executables
> and support data into one system-central bin directory simply
> doesn't work for everybody and everything. I have a hard time
> believing that this is the only way provided by Debian.

Please send your complaints to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard Group,
neither to me nor to Debian.


> Among other reasons, it only would make sense for people who
> don't care which version they are using, which is relatively rare
> with Radiance. Those who actually work with this stuff will
> easily have several different versions on their system for
> various purposes. An install procedure that does its job right
> would take care of that as well.

It's not the job of a distribution to take care for specialized
installations. That's why you can download the source using your
favorite package management tool and recompile it. Then you're also free
to install to /usr/local or /opt.

> Alternatively, *if* we start renaming executables, then we should
> do a complete overhaul (eg. with release 4.0), so that after that
> *all* names will be reasonably unique.

This would probably not be bad for the future, especially as you don't
know when there'll be some really important tool with the same or
similar name as a radiance binary. Git (GNU Interactive Tools) is a
prominent example here, since Linus decided to use git as name for his
VCS. But I can't see any reason to have an extra hurry here.

> There are several
> possible ways to make this largely transparent, so that Radiance
> would still accept the old names internally, and transpose them
> to the new ones. Not fool proof for all situations, but a
> possible way to soften the blow to the users. But let's not drag
> things out unnecessarily by renaming two or three items every few
> months, which is bound to happen if we start with just genbox
> now.

Not sure how you figured these numbers out and why this should happen,
but I've explained that often enough now.
There's no need for anybody to rename genbox now, except for the Debian
package. Let Radiance stay in Debian and see what's happening, nobody
forces you to use it.

-- 
Bernd Zeimetz
<bernd at bzed.de>                         <http://bzed.de/>