Re: Zutils vs single compressor utilities

[Eric Blake]

On 12/14/2010 11:27 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 12/14/10 10:48, Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:
>> I am not sure this is enough to guarantee the peaceful coexistence of both 
>> packages, unless the build-time option is to rename by default.
> 
> That sounds too drastic.  I am not a fan of gzip's scripts,
> but I've learned from years of maintenance that a lot of
> people use them and depend on their every idiosyncrasy.
> I suspect it's better to approach any such replacement conservatively,
> where the default is to do things as they were done before.

As long as it is a configure-time option, with the default being the way
it was before, but the ability to change it is easy, then distros will
use the option to make the change.  The burden of remembering to use the
option is then limited to the few people who build both gzip and zutils
themselves from upstream rather than relying on a distro; those people
tend to be the ones technically savvy enough to realize the
ramifications of building from scratch, and should be capable of
realizing when to use the new configure option.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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