Program names and "pollution"

Posted Apr 3, 2019 21:12 UTC (Wed) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896)
Parent article: Program names and "pollution"

At first I thought "A Linux user's $PATH likely contains well over a thousand different commands..." meant "a thousand different directories". That is highly unlikely, and not what the author meant anyway (but I note it in case someone else has that misunderstanding).

Trying to figure out "what package installed this" from just the name is a terrible idea. There are already package management tools that accurately provide this information; please use them. Trying to guess from the name will be wrong too often to be useful.

I think if you are creating new programs it'd be wise to have easily disambiguated names. Not because that should replace a package manager, but because that will avoid a lot of unnecessary heartache and confusion if the same name has multiple meanings.

I think it'd be good if PostgreSQL created synonyms with new non-generic names and used them uniformly in new scripts, while retaining the old (deprecated) names for a long time for backwards compatibility. Not because you're trying to replace a package manager, but because someone who never uses PostgreSQL is likely (sooner or later) to use the same names. If you supported the "old" and "new" names for a long time (say 7+ years), it could be relatively painless.