Subject: Re: Name clash in prospective package

From: Fernando <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 02:06:46 -0400 (EDT)

I think it would be better to change the name of the Mercury Compiler to
something like "mercc".

The reasons are:

	1) Minimal disturbance to current debian users. They now use mc to
launch Midnight Comander.

	2) Seniority (?). Midnight Commander took the name first (within
Debian, I don't know which program is older).

	3) Compatibility with other Linux distributions. They usually
include the Midnight Commander (and they call it "mc").

	4) Popularity. Midnight Commander is more popular among Linux
users than Mercury Compiler. More people in this community use "mc" to
mean the former.

	5) Personal preference :-) (This point is questionable, I know).

Cheers,
	Fernando.

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From: [email-masked] (Erick Branderhorst)
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 09:39:15 +0100

> Not completely alone---I'd prefer prompting about /usr/local.  Why?
> Because /usr/local on all our machines here (not just debian) is an
> nfs-mounted directory, and typically mounted readonly or root-squash
> so that I know nothing on the client machines is going to be able to
> diddle with it.
> 
> Prompting about /usr/local is one of the little things packages could
> do that make life easier on those of us that try to maintain large
> numbers of debian machines.

Should this be solved by moving all /usr/local dir structure to the postinst
prerm scripts and be created there after prompting the installer?

Erick

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From: Warwick HARVEY <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Aug 1996 17:30:53 +1000

It seems obvious from the responses I've had, that one of the programs needs
to be renamed (no other solutions were presented, and, frankly, I can't
really think of one that won't cause problems).  If we assume this is the
case, it is fairly obvious which one should be renamed: the Mercury one.

Mercury's "mc" probably isn't often invoked by the average Mercury user -
it's normally called by the automated build tools that come with it.  This
means that many users won't notice the change anyway.  For anyone who's
interested, the new name will be "merc" (chosen by consultation with the
Mercury authors).

				Warwick

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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