Package review request: OpenBSD calendar(1) command

[Eric Sandeen]

Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 18.02.2009, 09:13 -0600 schrieb Jason L Tibbitts III:
>>>>>>> "CW" == Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> writes:
>> CW> Way to generic IMHO. If this is going to set a precedent, it will
>> CW> be hard to tell other maintainers, why /usr/bin/email [1] is a bad
>> CW> idea.
>>
>> Has /usr/bin/email been an expected part of many Unix systems for
>> twenty years as /usr/bin/calendar has?
> 
> No, it hasn't. Maybe you are right and we could make an exception from
> the rules, but I think "this has been around for a long time" is not a
> good reason. If we followed that approach we could stop making changes
> at all.

I think it's a perfectly valid reason to let it keep its expected name.
 Some tools were quite reasonably named ages ago and are expected by
sysadmins and users to be named as they have been for a decade.

Changing the venerable "calendar" now because some new unspecified,
unwritten future app may also wish to name itself "calendar" is silly, IMHO.

I mean, "cat" is short for "concatenate" which some future concatenation
utility may also wish to use.  Not only is "concatenate" a very common
word, "cat" is a very simple abbrevation which may clash with "catalog"
or "categorize" - Shall we also change its name?  Where does this stop?

-Eric

p.s. /usr/bin/the-utility-formerly-known-as-calendar does have a certain
ring to it though I suppose.