[arch-dev-public] Naming conventions for co-existing executables (was: qt4 replaces qt)

[Rashif Ray Rahman]

On 4 March 2013 19:59, Andrea Scarpino <andrea at archlinux.org> wrote:

> On Thursday 28 February 2013 00:14:55 you wrote:
> > Please maintainers fix your PKGBUILDs so they build on systems with both
> qt4
> > and qt5-base installed; when your PKGBUILD needs qt4 and:
> > * use qmake, you can replace it with qmake4
> > * use cmake, you can add -DQT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE=qmake4 to the cmake
> options
>
> Just a note here: I had to remove the qmake4 symlink and use qmake-qt4
> instead
> as the former was inconsistent with others distro.
> When I did this change (1th March) qmake4 wasn't really used yet so I did
> not
> think to write this mail before. I'm sorry if this caused more confusion
> here.


I have wondered about this for a while. I think that is best convention to
follow and we should apply that to all transitional packages from now on.
That is, instead of:

qt4-foo
python2-foo

or:

foo4
foo2

or some other variant, we should have:

foo-qt4
foo-python2

This applies to the executables only (and only when we're making the
change, not upstream), and has nothing to do with the package name. It is
intuitive because this way tab-completion or common sense shows you the
possibilities in case you have upgraded.

However, I am not sure how portable this convention is and whether other
distros are likely to behave the same way. Still, 'foo4' is very misleading
as the '4' is a version number of a dependency, and not of the program
itself.


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