libutil in Debian

[Alfred Perlstein]

On 7/9/13 8:05 AM, Robert Millan wrote:
> Hi Gleb,
>
> 2013/7/9 Gleb Smirnoff <glebius at freebsd.org>:
>> With all respect to GNU and Debian the libutil in BSD appeared in 1988,
>> and the fact that GNU has taken that name in 1996 isn't reason for BSD
>> to change name.
> Thanks for pointing this out.
>
> Please note that my request is only based on practical grounds. It
> shouldn't be interpreted as implying endorsement on Glibc's use of
> libutil name.
>
> Historically, Glibc maintainer has been very difficult to deal with.
> This has affected non-Linux ports of Glibc as well. In contrast,
> FreeBSD community may or may not agree with proposals but is at least
> open to discuss things. This (rather than "fairness") is the reason I
> try to work things out here and not there.
>
> Please take it as a compliment rather than as offence :-)
>
>> Also, FreeBSD is just one of the BSD descendants, and all of them share
>> the libutil.
> So, I take it that the change I'm proposing could have disruptive effects.
>
> I do think there are long-term advantages for FreeBSD and the other
> BSD descendants in making it easy for their APIs to be deployed
> elsewhere. I mean, in terms of portability.
>
> However I'm clearly biased so I'd rather not insist on this. I leave
> it for you to judge.
>

Robert, I can't promise anything other than maybe a proof of concept in 
patch form would work?

We already do have some utils we have in our base renamed to avoid 
conflicts such as lib*bsd*yaml.

Maybe there's a way to make this work since our system is tightly 
integrated.

Have you looked at what happens with autoconf/automake?  How bad does it 
look from that PoV?  Are there a ton of scripts that pull in libutil?  
Or is that only a small portion of the base?

Do you know how to do ports build on FreeBSD to see what breaks?

-- 
Alfred Perlstein
VP Software Engineering, iXsystems