Subject: Name clash in prospective package

From: Warwick HARVEY <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 18:29:13 +1000

G'day,

With the imminent release of a new version of Mercury (a purely declarative
programming language with strong modes, strong types, and strong
determinism), I thought I'd have another go at trying to package it.  One
problem I see, however, is that there is going to be a name clash between
one component of the Mercury compiler ("mc") and the utility Midnight
Commander ("mc").

Has this kind of problem occurred before?  How was it handled?  I know I
could just make it conflict with Midnight Commander, but that hardly seems a
``nice'' solution...  ;-)

The compiler by default installs itself in
	/usr/local/mercury-0.6/{bin,lib,...}
and I'm assuming in Debianising it I should be putting it in
	/usr/{bin,lib,...}
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

				Warwick

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Warwick Harvey                                    email: [email-masked]
Department of Computer Science                        phone: +61-3-9287-9171
University of Melbourne                                 fax: +61-3-9348-1184
Parkville, Victoria, AUSTRALIA 3052     web: http://www.cs.mu.OZ.AU/~warwick

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From: [email-masked] (Erick Branderhorst)
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 09:49:03 +0100

> it.  One problem I see, however, is that there is going to be a name clash
> between one component of the Mercury compiler ("mc") and the utility
> Midnight Commander ("mc").

Midnight Commander is a gnu package so it should be able to handle with name
changes easily.  How widespread is this Mercury compiler, are other names
in use for it? Midnight commander -> gmc?

> could just make it conflict with Midnight Commander, but that hardly seems a

I don't recall that this kind of problem happened before.  Several Awk and
vi and so are provided and one can choose which one has the commonly used
name.  But this is something else.
 
> Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Debian packages may not touch /usr/local for installing file (They may
create directories in there if I'm not mistaken).  Use
/usr/{bin,lib/mercury-0.6,...}.

Erick

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From: Lars Wirzenius <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 16:03:11 +0300

Warwick HARVEY:
> there is going to be a name clash between one component of the Mercury 
> compiler ("mc") and the utility Midnight Commander ("mc").

Do any of the Mercury components depend on having the compiler called
mc? If not, I think the Mercury compiler should be renamed. Midnight
Commander is an old package, and we must assume that many people
have startup scripts, aliases (er, make that shell functions), menu
configurations, and other things that depend on it being called mc.

Note that documentation should be relatively easy to convert, even
automatically, to use the new name of Mercury's compiler.

If Mercury's mc can't easily be changed, then I guess Midnight Commander's
mc should be changed.

> and I'm assuming in Debianising it I should be putting it in

You're correct.  No Debian package should touch /usr/local, ever (except
for first install, which creates it).

-- 
Lars Wirzenius <[email-masked]> <http://www.iki.fi/liw/>
Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.

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From: "Brian C. White" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 11:57:37 -0400

> one component of the Mercury compiler ("mc") and the utility Midnight

I'd probably recommend just changing the name of the compiler to simply
"mercury".  There is little point in shortening the name as much as
possible.  (One of my personal dislikes about unix in general.)

                                        Brian
                               ( [email-masked] )

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