[Radiance-general] Re: Radiance in Debian

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Hi Greg,

> 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.

I'll forward this to the maintainer of rcalc (which is our Debian
Project leader ;))

> 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?

Unfortunately I can't ship the link (policy doesn't care of it's a link
pointing to something or an actual binary), but everybody is free to add
one. I could even ship a script to add links to /usr/local/bin for
genbox and rview.


> 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?

That was the first name clash since a longer time I've seen (and shame
on me, I should have checked that before). Radiance ships so many utils
that it is much more prone to such problems than packages shipping only
one tool. I think in general using a common prefix for utils of one type
are very useful and common to avoid such problems, like k*/g* for
kde/gnome tools. Also our tech-ctte is pretty strict if people try to
use too generic names. For example packages like libcommon or libconfig
probably won't be accepted at all in Debian.


> 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.

Unfortunately I don;t see any other way yet.


Best regards,

Bernd

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