URGENT: Naming conflict in Cyrus-IMAP 2.2 vs. leafnode 1.9

[Rob Siemborski]

On Sun, 2 May 2004, Matthias Andree wrote:

> 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.

Hi Matthias,

I don't know what we can do in the next 4 days that will solve the problem
for Fedora.  Even if we were to release a new version that corrected the
problem in that time (unlikely), I highly doubt they'd be willing to adopt
it just to change the name.

For what its worth, our experience in the past has been that package
mantainers have delt with conflicts like this on their own (in several
cases, for example, "deliver" has been renamed to "cyrdeliver", and there
is also a conflict with the name of the postfix "master" process -- not
to mention "imapd" which conflicts fairly directly with the UW server)
quite successfully.  I don't see why this is significantly any different
(especially when it can be delt with, minimally, in the way that FreeBSD
does).

Changing the binary name in our release causes all of our users to have to
fix their systems to reference the new name when they upgrade.  This is
not something I take lightly, and would strongly prefer not to do.

I appreciate the problems with the namespace conflict, but if we were to
do this for all of our binaries every time a conflict was discovered, I
suspect we would quickly go mad.  FWIW, I'm perfectly fine with Fedora
changing the Cyrus fetchnews to cyrfetchnews in order to fix their
namespace conflict.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what I can do that can help before May 7 anyway.

-Rob

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper

---
Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus
Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu
List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html