[xml/sgml-pkgs] docbook2x: collision with docbook-utils and common program-transform-name

[Daniel Leidert]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay. I'm currently busy with some other stuff :)

Am Samstag, den 31.05.2008, 10:37 +0400 schrieb Peter Volkov:
> В Вск, 25/05/2008 в 14:02 +0200, Daniel Leidert пишет:
> > Am Mittwoch, den 21.05.2008, 12:19 +0400 schrieb Peter Volkov:

[..]
> > forked the docbook2x programs. So normally they should change the name.
> > But the author is not active anymore. So Steve, are you willing to
> > change the name? Considering the fact, that docbook2x can and will
> > handle XML instead of just SGML (docbook-utils), what about simply
> > changing the name to
> > 
> > docbookx2foo
> >        ^
> > 
> > On the other side, the suite is called docbook2x, so also
> > 
> > docbook2xfoo
> >         ^
> > would fit and not conflict with the docbook-utils.
> > 
> > Opinions?
> 
> I was not aware about pre-history of these packages. I'm curious now,
> why maintainers of didn't change names in docbook-utils?

Yeah. This would have been the correct decision. However, they are not
active anymore, so only docbook2x can change the names.

> It seems rather
> hard (as too many packages depend on docbook-utils in Gentoo: 
> http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/misc/dindex/app-text/docbook-sgml-utils
> ) but still possible to change names in docbook-utils and naming is
> rather obvious, taking your suggestion as an example - docbooksgml2man
> and docbooksgml2texi as this package works with sgml only and only
> docbook2man and docbook2texi collide. What do you thing about this?

I got the impression, that these tools are still widely used - more
widely than docbook2x. However, this is just an impression, which might
be wrong.

> On the other hand I have not problems with your suggestion...

Maybe docbook-utils should change the program names because of the
history of the programs. However: I think, that changing the names in
docbook2x would be the cleaner solution. It seems, most distributions
already did this, whereas the docbook-utils package has been shipped by
most (all?) distributions without renaming the programs. So IMHO
changing docbook2x seems to be less intrusive.

As written earlier, I would suggest one of the following:

docbook2x...
docbookx2...

I prefer the latter. It reflects the DocBook XML capabilities. Steve?

> P.S. I've just found that there is a list for inter-distribution
> communication: distributions at lists.freedesktop.org May be we should
> raise this problem there to try to get responses from other distributors
> too?

Please do so, if you want. I'm already subscribed to this list.

Regards, Daniel