[PATCH]Resolve file name conflicts in inn-2.5.3.

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> Hi Russ,

>> It would probably be better to change the configuration file as well,
>> since otherwise it's hard for the user to specify which man page they
>> want to see.  That avoids the file conflict, but there's still a
>> conceptual conflict; it pushes the burden to the user.

> Shouldn't we then also rename radius(8) to inn-radius(8)?

That's probably also a good idea in an ideal world, although I'm not sure
it's as important since I don't think anyone has reported a conflict
there.  It's also a bit harder to handle the upgrades, since that requires
messing about in the readers.conf file instead of just renaming a
configuration file.

Really, all of the auth programs should have had an inn-* prefix
originally.  I'm not sure whether it's worth renaming them unless someone
reports a specific problem, though.

> I also wonder if names like history(5), inews(1), ident(8), domain(8) or
> expire(8) would not suffer from the same problem...  They probably are
> not specific to INN...

inews is the standard name for doing the thing that inews does, so we
definitely shouldn't rename that one.

history and expire should, in retrospect, have had less generic names, but
they've been called that in netnews systems for forever, and I think it's
too late to rename them now.  On those, INN actually has precedence over
anyone else who wants to use the name (unlike with the radius.conf, where
we're a newcomer and clased with an existing file name).

ident and domain are less likely to clash, but in an ideal world would
also be renamed.  I'm not sure it's worth the trouble with no reported
problems, though.

If I were redesigning the entire INN command-line interface from scratch
right now, I'd probably do what Git does: have an inn command used for all
maintenance interaction with the news server that takes a variety of
subcommands (that are stored outside of the path) and that are documented
in man pages named inn-<subcommand>.  Modern versions of the man program
support converting the command "man git commit" into viewing the
git-commit(1) man page.  But this isn't the sort of thing that I think one
does retroactively; now, it would just confuse all the existing INN
installations without a lot of benefit.

Namespacing is one of those things people used to be much less careful
about when the total number of packages available was a lot smaller and
everyone installed things from source.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.