-------- Original Message --------
Subject: URGENT: Naming conflict in Cyrus-IMAP 2.2 vs. leafnode 1.9
Resent-Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 16:17:42 +0200
Resent-From: Michael Schwendt <fedora@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Resent-To: warren@xxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 16:11:28 +0200
From: Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@xxxxxx>
To: info-cyrus AT lists.andrew.cmu.edu, wcw+andrew2 AT cmu.edu,
cyrus-bugs AT andrew.cmu.edu, rjs3+cyrus AT andrew.cmu.edu
CC: rh0212ms AT arcor.de, fedora AT zuhause-local.de, ume AT freebsd.org
Dear sirs,
it has come to my attention today that version 2.2.3 of the Cyrus-IMAPd
package (announced 2004-01-15) has added a program and manual page
named "fetchnews" that were not present in previous official releases of
Cyrus-IMAPd such as 2.1.16 (2003-11-20).
I am the current maintainer of the "leafnode" NNTP package[1]
that has been using a program and manual page named "fetchnews" since
the release of leafnode 1.9.3 on 1999-07-15 under the aegis of the
previous maintainer, Cornelius Krasel.[2]
This naming conflict triggered a bug report against Fedora Linux, see
https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=1445 -- and I expect that
more naming conflicts show up as more distributors upgrade their
cyrus-imapd packages to 2.2. FreeBSD also has conflicting names in the
ports collection.
As leafnode 1.9 has been using the "fetchnews" name for almost five
years to date and has also been shipping with various distributions for
years, among them major and established ones such as Debian GNU/Linux,
FreeBSD, Mandrake Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD and SuSE Linux, it appears
difficult to change the name in the middle of a leafnode stable series;
doing so would break existing configurations in those distributions, for
numerous users.
Given that Cyrus-IMAPd 2.2.3 has been released only this January, and
has not yet been adopted by all distributions (most are still shipping
Cyrus-IMAPd 2.1.N), renaming fetchnews to cyr_fetchnews would have
little impact _now_ but be a major inconvenience later.
Note that distributors HAVE TO take action, and to avoid every
distributor using their own name, causing confusion among our users,
let's address this from the top level.
Could you change your fetchnews program's name to cyr_fetchnews or
similar? I am offering to rename leafnode's fetchnews to something else
(leafnode-fetchnews, ln_fetchnews, to be determined) in the next major
version of leafnode, leafnode-2.0.0 (probably 2nd half 2004) in return.
I have marked the Subject "URGENT" because Fedora has scheduled a code
freeze for May 7th (next Friday), I'd hope that we can resolve the
problem before then.
Thank you in advance; I'm looking forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Matthias Andree
------------
[1] http://leafnode.sourceforge.net/
[2] The oldest public leafnode release that I am aware of is
leafnode-1.0.1, released 1996-11-04 by Arnd Gulbrandsen, Trolltech,
Oslo, NO.
