On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:01 PM, Alexander Rødseth
I think renaming a package should be slightly cumbersome, and not that easy. Just one rename has the potential to create work for dozens of package maintainers because of dependency issues. Let's say that maintainers has to upload 10 updated packages per rename, and that there are 10 renames a day, it would be quite a bit of overall extra work, with some breakage and no clear win, except more total consistency of the system as a whole. (Of course, these are made-up numbers and may not be accurate...).
I believe those numbers are highly unrealistic. The package renaming thing would only be used under special circumstances (like the upcoming kernel26 name change) and it wouldn't take any significant effort to handle. Even if it did, such circumstances are quite rare (Linux 2.6 was released 8 years ago) and it would be worth the trouble.