Program names and "pollution"

A Linux user's $PATH likely contains well over a thousand different commands that were installed by various packages. It's not immediately obvious which package is responsible for a command with a generic name, like createuser. There are ways to figure it out, of course, but perhaps it would make sense for packages like PostgreSQL, which is responsible for createuser, to give their commands names that are less generic—and more easily disambiguated—such as pg_createuser. But renaming commands down the road has "backward compatibility problems" written all over it, as a recent discussion on the pgsql-hackers mailing list shows.

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