Naming problem for the "Falcon Programming Language" in Ubuntu.

[Giancarlo Niccolai]

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I see the conversation has stopped, so I would think that some
"silence-agreement" point has been reached. I would like to write here
what I am going to do with the package and ask for general agreement on
the topic, but before, let me add an information  I have forgot to send
to the list, and that I think is important not just for my project, but
to help the constructive mood of the conversation in general.

The reason I decided originally to pack the package as "falconpl" was
the same that leaded me to use verbosely the name "The Falcon
Programming Language" in every piece of documentation and legal paper.
Before picking "falcon" as the name of my language, I did thoughtful
searches to avoid name clashes and I discovered that there was a FALCON
math framework (dating back in 1996). The framework had a scripting
language, but that was explicitly named "AMPLE". Apart from that, I
found many code, programs, framework, solutions etc. named after
"falcon" or using the word "falcon" as a part of their name; none of
them was directly related to a programming language, so I decided I
could have gone for Falcon, always specifying that it was a "scripting
language". If I ever "go inc.", the "The Falcon Programming Language"
name will be my trademark (also because a single word, as "falcon", is
not trademarkable under the Italian law, which is the law under which I
would be enforced to INC atm).

When I started thinking about packaging, I checked again and decided to
pack as "falconpl" mainly because of the following potential clashes
that may have caused confusion in the package users/downloaders:

- - Falcon: famous air combat simulation game
- - Falcon: new internal DB engine for MySQL (notice: this was after I
started the project)
- - Falcon Eye: roguelike game already packaged in all distros (yes, it
HAS a different package name, but I wouldn't even want to cause
confusion in falcon eye's users; "falcon" may have been interpreted as a
renaming of falconeye package, falconpl could not)
- - FALCON: math framework; seems quite a dead work, but the site is
active and someone may find interesting to revive it.

I knew nothing (not at the time, nor until 2007-21-12) of a "falcon"
packager tool, or it would have been in my list too.

Finally, falconpl is also the name of the site
(http://www.falconpl.org); except for the early comers as PHP and
python, many scripting language sites have some sort of "-language"
suffix in their name as the DNS namespace is somehow crowded, and ppl
tends to associate package names to project names, so, as the language
is "falcon" but the project is "The Falcon Programming Language", all
pushed me to get "falconpl" as the package name.

I renamed it to "falcon" after asking around to packagers, and being
told by someone that they would have preferred to have a package with
the same name of the main binary included into it; I am sorry I have no
precise record nor I remember exactly who told this to me, but I just
said "oh, well, they know better than me", repacked and uploaded on REVU.

What I am going to do, and for what I ask for confirmation:
- ------------------------------------------------------------
I am going to repack as "falconpl", set conflict with the "falcon"
package and re-upload in REVU. In the meanwhile I have (hopefully)
cleaned the stoppers that was listed in the REVU record by persia.
- ------------------------------------------------------------
Please send to the list or to me an OK or a stopper.

Other than this, I would like MOTUs to consider the binary clash
problem. Sooner or later the /usr/bin/falcon name will have to be dealt,
and it would be better if we deal about it now.

About the "falcon" namespace in general, having witnessed what happened
here, I submitted as "falcon" the package to other debian-based distros;
this is just to prevent an undiscussed submission of the same two
packages to other distros with the nameclash question still unresolved.
I will immediately rename the package as "falconpl" as I get assurance
that the packaging tool "falcon" won't be submitted to other distros
with the package name "falcon" and with the clash on /usr/bin/falcon.
This both to help debbers to stay in synch, and because I prefer
"falconpl" as package name for my language.

What matters to me with regards to the Ubuntu distro is just that the
name clash on the binary file is somehow dealt with, and the above
solution (Conflict: thing) is ok to me, but I don't want this situation
of over-posting to happen again, so I do *not* require the other falcon
packager package to change name. However, let me advance a simple
suggestion to the packagers and developers of the packaging tool
"falcon", and to the MOTUs.

The "falcon" project name needs not to be the "falcon" package name.
Probably, the distro and the project themselves would benefit in using a
bit more specific name, as, by pure example falcon-pkg. I really believe
that "falconpl" serves the falcon language better than just "falcon" as
a distro package name. Being more specific may also avoid clashes in
future, i.e. with the MySQL falcon DB engine, as the falcon-pkg owners
may then rightfully ask the distro makers to name the db engine package
as falcon-dbe or mysql-falcon-dbe. Also, having a falcon-pkg title would
still be a more than valid reason to ask packages not to be named simply
"falcon" in any case, as this would case not a name clash, but still a
name "confusion". This is just a totally uninterested advice, and
everyone here may feel free to ignore it.









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