Re: gobject-introspection typelibs and shared libraries

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 9:43 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>>> So far we’ve resisted the temptation, and it’s rarely been an issue.
>>> :-)
>>
>> Could you elaborate on the down sides? (I'm not trying to insist, but to learn.)
>
> Basically it’s good to stick to what GCC does, and GCC does not install
> ‘cc’.  There’s a subjective aesthetic downside: it’s good to spread the
> ‘g’.  And also, it turns out to work for 99% of the packages.

OK, I thought you were referring to technical reasons...

A different look at aesthetics: Back in the mid '90, when Linux was
still an underground curiosity, many UNIX admins were starting to
install GNU user-land applications. To avoid name clashes with the
vendor versions of programs they were prefixing all GNU applications
with a 'g'. So, the GNU version of 'ls' was named 'gls', 'awk' ->
'gawk', ...  Now on GNU/Linux systems there's no need for such
prefixing and, for consistency and to send a message, you may just
name the C compiler with the traditional name 'cc' which means: Hey,
this is the official system C compiler and of course, it's the GNU
one.

Regards,
Fede