[csw-maintainers] no one else who matters? (was CSWcswclassutils: it wants to write in /usr)

[Gary Law]

Hi

2009/12/11 Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com>:
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Gary Law <glaw at opencsw.org> wrote:
>> 2009/12/10 Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com>:
>>> A quick off-the-cuff solution:
>>>
>>> We declare that classutils implementations must be backwards
>>> compatible. If you want to do something incompatible,you must do it in
>>> a newly named class.
>>>
>>> Problem solved?
>>
>> Might be if there were no-one out there shipping identically named
>> utils installing in the same place, who might just go ahead and
>> upgrade thiers in an incompatible way. But there is.
>>
>
> no one else (who matters...) is going to be shipping any pkg class
> utils named "cswxxxx".
> our namespace is safe.

I'm sorry, there is someone else who really does matter shipping
identically named software, Blastwave. They have a larger installed
base, more hits on google (*much* more in fact, and more recent new
pages that refer to them too), active forums and IRC channel that
suggest plenty of users.

What we have is, IMHO, better software. However, we give the software
the same pkg name as them, and install in the same place, which given
our generally commitment to quality, is madness. I've said it before
and I'm going to say it again: we need to shift name space and
distinguish this project from Blastwave. We completely lack
credibility otherwise, and have to worry -- as we are now -- about
collisions.

In this particular case, of course, this is a real problem. I've got
to go to my provider of zones and say ' install this package ' and
hope none of their other customers ever want to use Blastwave. If I
was a commercial provider of zones, and had an understanding of these
issues, I'd refuse to install our package (and the Blastwave one of
the same name) just to avoid future support headaches.

-- 
glaw at opencsw.org