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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

The same acronym is... a questionable choice. But the matching binary names are standard for projects which are compatible replacements for the other project. You're basically releasing something with a different name, but implementing "previous-software-name" interface. This helps with drop-in replacement distro packages to.

That's why Ubuntu has the alternatives system. And why mawk / gawk / etc. are often linked to /bin/awk.

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You don't actually need to name your binary after your project you know.

The same acronym is underhanded.

And it's entirely possible to use different software names for projects that implement a compatible API or service, the claim that it's for compatibility is pretty bogus. It's not "standard", especially not for an adversarial fork. And that's not why the alternatives system exists, the alternatives system exists so differently named packages can implement a particular service (i.e., exactly the opposite, for the equivalent in shell commands). So that's underhanded.

Alternatives works that way, because conflicting binary names are messy to handle, but at the same time it works that way, because that's the behaviour you normally want in your system. You want "a grep" and "an awk" and many others.

I know how alternatives work, and they are not used to make packages with the same named binaries drop in replacements.

They are used to make packages with differently named binaries able to implement standard shell commands.

There is no need to match binary names. It doesn't really help with anything.

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