Re: New bc

[Gavin Howard <gavin.d.howard%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 6:35 PM Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> Gavin Howard <gavin.d.howard%gmail.com@localhost> writes:
>
> > On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 8:47 AM Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:
> >>
> >> Gavin Howard <gavin.d.howard%gmail.com@localhost> writes:
> >>
> >> > Would there be interest in adding my bc as a port?
> >>
> >> We call them packages (vs the FreeBSD term port; here port means cpu
> >> typ), but that's not important.
> >
> > Oh, whoops. I have been working with FreeBSD and got mixed up. My bad.
>
> No problem, and you are not the first!  It's an unfortunate historical
> accident.
>
> I'll write to you offline about wip access.
>
> > I named it "bc" so that people would know that it is, in fact, a bc.
> > However, in the Linux distros and other *BSD's, my bc is named
> > differently, which is possible because the build system accepts both a
> > prefix and a suffix to add to the executable name.
> >
> > For example, OpenBSD uses the following:
> >
> > EXECPREFIX="e" ./configure.sh
> >
> > and names the package "ebc". It installs the manpages under "ebc" and
> > "edc", and does the same for locales.
> >
> > Void Linux is a Linux distro that has my bc as a package. They call it
> > "bc-gh" and use the following:
> >
> > EXECSUFFIX="-gh" ./configure.sh
> >
> > The manpages and locales are installed in the expected locations.
> >
> > In other words, I can name the package on NetBSD whatever I want, and
> > it will still work. I do still want to keep my upstream named "bc",
> > though, just so people know what it is.
>
> We are talking about pkgsrc, which is the standard package system on
> NetBSD and Illumos, and builds on about 20 systems.

Did not know that Illumos used it...

> I can see your point about bc, but I would urge you strongly to have a
> standard name to be used when bc is not ok, so that it ends up
> consistent.  Having ebc and bc-gh just does not seem helpful.  By
> "have", I think I mean a normative statement in the build instructions.

The truth is that I, personally, have standardized on "bc-gh" when my
bc is not the default bc. However, some maintainers have their own
opinions. OpenBSD, for example, explicitly wanted "ebc" when I
suggested "bc-gh" because of culture and inertia. Some Linux distros
named their packages of my bc without my input, but in the majority,
it is "bc-gh".

Basically, I suggest "bc-gh", but there are some cases where
opinionated people want different names. I do agree, however, that
standardizing would be ideal.

> I wonder if there is any packaging system where your bc is just bc.  I
> suppose we could have a package bc-gh that installed to bc, and
> conflicts with GNU bc, but I'm not sure that's helpful to most.

There are, in fact, package managers where my bc is called just "bc".
This is because there are a few Linux distros where my bc is already
the default:

* Sabotage Linux (http://sabotage.tech/)
* Adelie Linux (https://www.adelielinux.org/)
* Ataraxia Linux (https://ataraxialinux.github.io/)

All of those distros are opinionated distros and hate GNU tools (I
think they all use busybox instead, but I would have to check again).

Anyway, thank you for your help, both on- and off-list.

Gavin Howard