From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2004-11-18T01:47:57+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] rpa-base 0.2.3

On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 11:58:35PM +0900, David A. Black wrote:
> > versioned require, and nicer to third party port/package systems (think
> > of Debian for instance).
> 
> Can I put in a plea for not cultivating the "program2" syndrome in
> Ruby programs and libraries?  Maybe it's just a pet peeve... but I
> really hate it when, a year or two after setting up a system with kde,
> xchat, apache, libxml, etc., I'm suddenly running kde3, xchat2,
> apache2, libxml2, etc.  Those are silly names for programs, whereas
> the original names were relatively reasonable.  

I personally don't find them silly; de gustibus non disputandum est.
It makes sense to follow that convention for libraries, and there are
good reasons to do so...

> The prospect of everything having to end in a number as a packaging
> workaround suggests to me that something needs to be addressed in the
> packaging system. 

Are you going to contact developers from FreeBSD, Debian, Fedora, Suse,
PLD, Gentoo, etc to make them change their systems?

> Surely having a package/program/library name and a
> version number as separate things is not only more aesthetically
  ==============
It's not primarily about the version number itself but about an API
declaration.

Since the new RubyMail will have a completely incompatible API, it is
de facto another library -- and no longer the original "RubyMail", hence
the possible need for another name. RubyMail2 shows its heritage.

> appealing but vastly more scaleable.
> 
> 
> David (who intends to keep calling Ruby Ruby, whatever its version :-)

Unless when referring to Ruby 2 I guess...

-- 
Hassle-free packages for Ruby?
RPA is available from http://www.rubyarchive.org/