[ogg-dev] oggz tool renames

[Conrad Parker]

2008/7/16 John Ferlito <johnf at inodes.org>:
>> Now there's the minor problem of upgrading from an earlier version of
>> oggz, and having both versions of the
>> tools around (eg. having an old oggzdump lying around even as
>> oggz-dump is upgraded). What are your thoughts about ways to deal with
>> this? eg.
>>
>>  * On 'make install', replace the existing executables [if present]
>> with symlinks to the new ones. ie. Replace oggzdump with a symlink to
>> oggz-dump [if and only if oggzdump exists]
>
> I like this as it won't break any scripts.
>
>>  * On 'make install', forcibly remove the old binaries if they are present
> I'd say do this in 2 releases time.
>
>>  * On 'make uninstall', forcibly remove the old binaries if they are present
> Wouldn't bother here. Since make uninstall is rarely used and it
> should only deal with uninstalling what it installed.
>>
>>  * On 'make uninstall-old-cruft', forcibly remove the old binaries if
>> they are present
>>
>>  * Do nothing, but document that people should explicitly "make
>> uninstall" in the old version before installing the new one; or
>> (similarly) that it's a packaging problem, and distro maintainers
>> should deal with it
>
> I don't like the nothing approach since then people will have two lots
> of binaries on their system which is just going to cause confusion.
>
> For the debian packages I'll be providing symlinks along with a
> warning at install that the binary names have changes and symlinks
> will be deprecated in future version
>
> Another idea could be that in the next release you make symlinks. The
> release after that turn the symlinks into scripts which print a
> deprecation warning and then run the old binary. In the release after
> that remove the symlinks.

Ok, in changeset:3776 (http://trac.annodex.net/changeset/3776), I've
made it so that 'make install' will add symlinks for deprecated tool
names, but only if they are already installed;
and 'make uninstall' will remove each deprecated tool -- but only if it is a
symlink, to keep to the policy of only uninstalling what we installed.

thanks for the feedback John, and others that discussed this over irc or beer.

The Makefile rules I used just call "rm" and "ln -s" directly. Does
anyone have advice about how to make this portable, ie. is it ok to
just write $(RM) and $(LN_S), after calling AC_PROG_RM and
AC_PROG_LN_S in configure.ac, or would that make configure fail if
those programs aren't installed in the first place?

please test :-)

Conrad.