Package naming dilemma

[Christopher Faylor]

On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 03:57:12PM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
>On 14 August 2006 14:17, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>On Sat, Aug 12, 2006 at 08:47:04PM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
>>>Incidentally, it's also part of my plan to maintain it with the old
>>>cygwin make DOS path-handling patches, which I hope will satisfy a lot
>>>of the current complaints on the main list.  :D
>>
>>I'm not too wild about having two different makes with two different
>>capabilities in the distribution.
>>
>
><shrugs> I was proposing to take all those dos-path-handling gripes off
>your shoulders.

It won't take them off my shoulders.  It will just require more
explanation.

>Put it another way: what kind of confusion or other problem could you
>see arising?  Perhaps I can think of a way to mitigate it.

  "My makefile doesn't work!"

  "You're using MS-DOS filenames.  Use remake instead."

  "What's remake?  Why do I have to do this?  Why can't I use GNU make?  It
  seems to me..."

As opposed to:

  "My makefile doesn't work!"

  "You're using MS-DOS filenames.  Fix your makefile."

The point is that we want people to get out of the habit of using MS-DOS
filenames under cygwin whereever possible.  It was actually a bug that
allowed the previous version of make to use MS-DOS paths without
specifying the --win32 option on the command line.

>I don't see why this should be inherently any more confusing than
>having both make and scons in the distro; they're two separate packages
>with differing names and similar functionality.

I believe that I had objections when bashdb was first proposed because
there were two packages with one code base and two different
maintainers.  While we have that now for vim, and maybe a small number
of other packages, I don't think it is a good idea to promulgate this
kind of arrangement.

cgf