Le Thu, Feb 27, 2025 at 03:02:08PM +0800, Sean Whitton a écrit :

Packages that already install programs to /usr/games, where another
package installs a program of the same with different functionality
to a different directory on the default PATH, may continue to do so.

Hi Sean,

I would like to know why this exemption is only given to games? We have scientific software that have been installing conflicting binaries for
more than one decade without any of their users complaining about it,
and I do not understand why it becomes a priority to change them now.

(I am not questionning the value of having a cleaner namespace, I am
just pointing to the fact doing such improvement will be at the expense
of doing other improvements, since our time is limited).

I also wonder if the cost of this policy will increase with time given
that a) the number of existing software is increasing, b) the number of
Debian packages is increasing, c) upstreams care less and less about co-instability because of containers, conda namespaces etc.

Importantly, each time we rename a binary, we become incompatible with third-party scripts, upstream documentation, *overflow advices and LLM
outputs that summarise the whole of that.

Have a nice day,

Charles

--
Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan
Debian Med packaging team http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tooting from home https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
- You do not have my permission to use this email to train an AI -

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On Thu, Feb 27, 2025 at 06:11:52PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:

Packages that already install programs to /usr/games, where another
package installs a program of the same with different functionality
to a different directory on the default PATH, may continue to do so.

Hi Sean,

I would like to know why this exemption is only given to games? We have scientific software that have been installing conflicting binaries for
more than one decade without any of their users complaining about it,
and I do not understand why it becomes a priority to change them now.

Are they installing them into different directories? That would be
surprising to me.

(I am not questionning the value of having a cleaner namespace, I am
just pointing to the fact doing such improvement will be at the expense
of doing other improvements, since our time is limited).

I also wonder if the cost of this policy will increase with time given
that a) the number of existing software is increasing, b) the number of Debian packages is increasing, c) upstreams care less and less about co-instability because of containers, conda namespaces etc.

Importantly, each time we rename a binary, we become incompatible with third-party scripts, upstream documentation, *overflow advices and LLM outputs that summarise the whole of that.

All of this applies to the old version of the Policy.

--
WBR, wRAR

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* Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> [250227 10:12]:

Le Thu, Feb 27, 2025 at 03:02:08PM +0800, Sean Whitton a écrit :

Packages that already install programs to /usr/games, where another
package installs a program of the same with different functionality
to a different directory on the default PATH, may continue to do so.

I would like to know why this exemption is only given to games? We have scientific software that have been installing conflicting binaries for
more than one decade without any of their users complaining about it,
and I do not understand why it becomes a priority to change them now.

Please provide real examples of science packages and numbers of
affected science packages that were affected by this change.

Chris

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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Hello,

On Thu 27 Feb 2025 at 06:11pm +09, Charles Plessy wrote:

Le Thu, Feb 27, 2025 at 03:02:08PM +0800, Sean Whitton a écrit :

Packages that already install programs to /usr/games, where another
package installs a program of the same with different functionality
to a different directory on the default PATH, may continue to do so.

Hi Sean,

I would like to know why this exemption is only given to games? We have scientific software that have been installing conflicting binaries for
more than one decade without any of their users complaining about it,
and I do not understand why it becomes a priority to change them now.

I didn't know about this. Please share some examples on debian-policy@lists.d.o.

--
Sean Whitton

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