Re: Symlinks to generic names

[John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au>]

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On Sun, Feb 02, 2014 at 08:34:23AM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
     John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> skribis:
     
     > Some software (rightly or wrongly) tries to build with "lex" and "yacc" .  Guix does not provide these.
     > Instead we have "flex" and "bison".  Most operating systems have symbolic links lex -> flex and yacc -> bison.
     > Shouldn't we provide these too?
     
     We had a similar discussion for ‘cc’ vs. ‘gcc’, but in practice ‘cc’ has
     been rare enough that it’s not worth bothering.
     
     I believe Autoconf-based packages do not have any problems with ‘flex’
     and ‘bison’.  What package was it?  How hard is it to work around?
     

We should at least be consistent.  In guix we have a (hard) link from sh -> bash
For consistency I believe we should also have

csh -> tcsh
lex -> flex
yacc -> bison
cc -> gcc
egrep -> grep

Then there are various versioned commands:

python3 -> python
wish8.6 -> wish


Otherwise, individual packages are forced to do substitutes - not particularly onerous, but it 
makes the maintenance a pain.

Just my $0.02

J'




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