Re: zutils binary names conflicts

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello Nuno,

Nuno Teixeira wrote:
> I'm about to maintain Zutils FreeBSD port (
> https://www.freshports.org/archivers/zutils/ ) and I'm dealing with
> conflicts with base gzip and ZFS ztest.

Thank you! :-)

> Currently, port has set:
> CONFLICTS_INSTALL=      gzip # bin/zcat bin/zcmp bin/zdiff bin/zgrep
> man/man1/ztest.1.gz

My opinion about the conflict with the scripts packaged with GNU gzip is 
that they should be renamed to gzcat, gzcmp, gzdiff, and gzgrep because they 
just understand the formats supported by gzip. This would be in line with 
other scripts like bzcat, xzdiff, zstdgrep, and even with the lzdiff and 
lzgrep scripts distributed with early versions of lzip.

But meanwhile someone convinces gzip upstream of renaming their scripts, I 
have copied from gzip's configure to the INSTALL file of zutils the way of 
renaming the scripts:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you are installing zutils along with GNU gzip and want to keep the
gzip scripts, the recommended method is to configure gzip as follows:

   ./configure --program-transform-name='s/^z/gz/'

This renames, at installation time, the gzip scripts and man pages to
'gzcat', 'gzcat.1', etc, avoiding the name clashing with the programs and
man pages from zutils.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

About the conflict with man/man1/ztest.1.gz, my opinion is that it should be 
renamed to something like zfstest or zfs_unit_test, in line with dosfsck, 
e2fsck, jfs_fsck, and reiserfsck, because it is not at all obvious that 
ztest refers to a ZFS unit test.

Note that the environment variables used by ZFS's ztest already have 
sensible names: ZFS_HOSTID ZFS_STACK_SIZE.

> void linux pkg renames binary names to capitals on first letter to
> deal with this.

FWIW, I don't like this idea. I find it fragile and confusing.

Hope this helps.

Antonio.