libXScrnSaver versus libXss

[Mike A. Harris]

Kevin E Martin wrote:
> 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.

Ah, I thought the renaming was intentional.



>>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.

Personally I find it confusing that out of 40 libraries, the package
name of the library is the same as the .so name of the library except
for one.  I understand that the package was renamed to have a better
name, but since it is the only package doing this, it is now the only
package inconsistent with all other library packages, and there are
various others that have nondescriptive names.

IMHO, all packages should be renamed to descriptive names, or all of
them should use the .so name as the package name.  My personal thought
is that naming the package names the same as the .so is more consistent,
easier to determine what the package name is from the .so name when
filing bugs or trying to find an updated library, less confusing to
end users, etc.  Package descriptions and documentation IMHO are best
at describing what a library is for.

libXxf86dga is a good example of a poorly named library more than libXss
is IMHO.  ;o)

I guess I basically don't find the value in breaking consistency just
for a single library, unless it brings us real value.