libXScrnSaver versus libXss

[Kevin E Martin]

On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 12:17:06PM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> Previous monolithic releases of Xorg and XFree86, the screensaver
> library was "libXss".  In the modular X11R7 RC0 release, this
> library was renamed to libXScrnSaver, which is a lot more
> descriptive of what it is, but later in the 0.99.1 release of
> the libXScrnSaver package, the installed .so name is reverted
> to "libXss.so.*".

Actually, that's not correct -- the installed library was never intended
to be renamed.  The package name only was changed to libXScrnSaver to be
more descriptive than libXss.  Unfortunately, there was a bug that
caused the installed library to be named libXScrnSaver.so for a short
time, but that was fixed as you note in 0.99.1.

> This seems to be the only package that has a installed .so
> which is a different name than the name of the tarball.  In the
> interest of consistency and reduction of confusion, I recommend
> that the tarball and CVS module get renamed to libXss.
> 
> I agree that libXScrnSaver is a better name for this library,
> but if that logic is followed to rename a library to something
> more meaningful, one could argue also to rename libXv to libXvideo,
> to rename libXp to libXprint, and similar with other libraries.

One can always come up with longer and more descriptive names. :-)

> Whatever the naming is given to any library, I think that the
> CVS module and modular X package that contains that library,
> should be named the same name to avoid confusion.
> 
> libXss has been shipped in the past both as a static lib, and
> as a shared lib, so if there is a long term rationale to rename
> libXss to be named libXScrnSaver, then we should do that now,
> and provide backward compat symlinks named libXss.so.* that
> point to the new library name.

The choice was to either keep the soname the same as the package name,
or to name the package something that is more readily understandable.
We discussed this a while back, and decided that going with something
that was more understandable was better.

Since the only package that people didn't know what library it referred
to immediately was Xss, that one was renamed.  Others could be renamed
as well, if there are people that think we need to make longer names.
Personally, I prefer the more descriptive name for Xss.  However, if we
want to make a strict policy that soname must be the same as the package
name, then I agree that we should rename the package back to Xss.

Kevin