Subject: Re: Tool renames? was Re: First stab at glossary

From: Martin Langhoff <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 19:53:15 +1200

On 9/6/05, Linus Torvalds <[email-masked]> wrote:
> That wasn't the _point_.

Agreed - sorry I should have qualified my comment.

I agree with having useful extensions for ease of development. And I
agree with the suggestion of installing them with stripped extensions
-- to extend the abstraction.

OTOH...
> The point is, naming things as being "scripts" is useful. Grep is just an
> example. Naming things as being ".pl" or ".sh" is _not_ useful.

Hrmmm. Not so convinced about that. There are good reasons to
distinguish files with different internal syntax. Perhaps it's your
C-bias but for script maintainers it isn't helpful to deal with
-script prefixes.

If a bash script is rewritten in C, it is a useful and meaningful
change (from a developer perspective) that the file changes name. Both
can live in the tree while the new one matures, running diffs or
pickaxes will show one file created and another removed, instead of a
very meaningless diff. The same applies if it is rewritten in Perl, or
Python.

IOW: Perl programmers are developers too ;-)

cheers,

martin