Re: coreutils and GNU_PROGRAM_PREFIX

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2021-02-03 at 03:31 GMT, matthew green wrote:

> 'gid' from idutils -- id-utils -- was in pkgsrc in 1997.  pour
> coreutils didn't appear for several years more, so there's a clear
> ownership of /usr/pkg/bin/gid to me.

Just to address this separately, it can be incredibly frustrating for
new users of pkgsrc when the package they expect to install turns out
to be some random piece of software from 20 years ago that very few
people have even heard of, and it turns a lot of people away.

While we should avoid churn, I think we do need to move with the times
when it makes sense.  If you surveyed 10,000 random developers today
what they would expect to happen if they typed:

  $ pkgin install hugo

I would be very surprised if more than 2 of them replied with:

  hugo-3.1.02.1nb4     Interactive fiction design system and interpreter

Similarly with idutils vs coreutils, it's obviously a representative
sampling, but downloads from pkgsrc.joyent.com for them are:

  coreutils: 18,383
  idutils:       38

I spend quite a bit of my time trying to explain to users why pkgsrc
has some weird quirks around package names and why things aren't where
they expect them to be.  It's pretty draining, and they come away with
a terrible impression of pkgsrc.  That's just baggage we have to deal
with being a mature project with lots of history, but I'd rather not
make things worse by changing something as popular as coreutils.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com