[Radiance-general] Re: Radiance in Debian

[Greg Ward]

Hi Bernd,

I'm very grateful to the folks who are willing to rename rcalc, as  
this would have been a lot of work to change in Radiance.  Even if  
it's not one of the most common commands from a user's perspective,  
it's applied in dozens of scripts, mine and others', which would have  
been very tedious to track down and change.

However, as Randolph says, genbox is also widely used, mostly in  
scene descriptions.  While we cannot easily change the existing docs,  
this didn't stop us from renaming "rview" to "rvu" to avoid the clash  
with one of vi's half-dozen monikers.  As you noticed, I added a  
symbolic link in the executable directory from rview -> rvu as a stop- 
gap until people picked up the new name.  Would it be possible to do  
this with genbox -> genrbox?

Asking that packages not have any name collisions is a laudable but  
not terribly realistic goal.  Surely, there are so many Debian  
packages by now that name collisions must happen left and right.  No?

If we aren't even allowed a symbolic link, one dastardly work-around  
is to add a check for the "genbox" command when parsing scene input,  
substituting "genrbox" and printing a warning of its deprecation.   
Ugly, but it might work.

-Greg

> From: Randolph Fritz <randolph at panix.com>
> Date: October 19, 2007 6:28:36 AM PDT
>
> "Genbox" is a name in a decades-old language, and I don't see that  
> most researchers are going change their scene descriptions to  
> accomodate it, let alone revise the docs.  Could it (and the other  
> scene generation primitives) perhaps be placed in a separate  
> directory?
>
> Randolph
>
> On Oct 19, 2007, at 2:09 AM, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
>
>>
>> My suggestion would be to rename genbox to genrbox, but I'm open  
>> for any
>> other suggestion.