On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:18:36AM +0200, Heiko Baums wrote:
Am Wed, 20 Jul 2011 05:48:34 +0800 schrieb Ray Rashif <schiv@archlinux.org>:
Why? Because, 'virtualbox-additions' would be just as confusing as 'virtualbox-guest-additions' to a newcomer.
Not quite. When I was a newcomer to virtualbox I first read something about it incl. on upstream's website. There I found the Virtualbox Guest Additions - it was only an iso and nothing else - and found out what they are for. When searching the Arch Linux repos I found virtualbox-additions and virtualbox-guest-additions and I was really confused when virtualbox-guest-additions didn't do what I expected it to do (downloading and storing this iso). And then I asked myself: What is that and what is virtualbox-additions about which I never read anything particularly not on upstream's website?
I went through this too, but I read the names differently. The guest additions are *contained* on the ISO, so I assumed that the guest additions were in the package names virtualbox-guest-additions; the package is a shortcut bypassing the need to download an ISO, mount it in the guest, and install the additions from there.
So I think a correct naming scheme is pretty important particularly for newcomers.
I agree wholeheartedly with this, and if it's possible to come up with good names, and thereby not force newcomers to also read the pkgdesc before understanding what the packages contains, then that should be done. Other people have much more insight into the consequences of swapping names, so I'll stay out of that discussion. /M -- Magnus Therning OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 email: magnus@therning.org jabber: magnus@therning.org twitter: magthe http://therning.org/magnus I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. -- Alan Kay