Executable should not be called 'scheme' about chezscheme HOT 11 CLOSED

Chez Scheme's executable has been called "scheme" since before the 1.0 release in 1985, and my fingers could not survive the change. It's straightforward to change the name on install by passing, e.g., InstallSchemeName=chez-scheme on the make install command line.

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This discussion seems to have run its course, and the resolution to use the make install option to select a different name seems to be acceptable, so I'm marking the issue closed.

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I've dealt with this in the ArchLinux PKGBUILD by renaming it to chez-scheme. The following files are affected:

• /usr/bin/scheme
• /usr/share/man/man1/scheme.1.gz
• /usr/lib/csv9.4/ta6le/scheme.boot
• maybe also /usr/lib/csv9.4/ta6le/scheme.h
  (csv9.4 and ta6le depend on version and machine type).

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why not just call it chez?

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And what of petite and scheme-script?

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Why would anyone want to run MIT scheme when they could run Chez scheme instead?

On a more serious note, historical precedent demands that scheme be the executable name, much like cc is the C compiler name regardless of vendor, and javac is the java compiler name, whether it came from Oracle or OpenJDK.

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Then it is up to downstream to provide necessary symlinks or wrappers, as is done with cc. (Although IIRC it is POSIX that requires stuff like cc, c98, c99, etc.)

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@dybvig: Thanks for the install switch. I'll do that next time.

@jltaylor-us: As someone who has 50 Schemes installed on his system (for good reason), I would go nuts if they were all named scheme. As for precedent, cc is a symlink on all the systems I have access to right now; it points to gcc, but could be changed to point to clang or for that matter lcc or tcc if I had them installed. The whole Debian /etc/alternatives system (now available in Fedora and elsewhere as well) depends on each alternative executable having a unique name. In addition, the AOT Java compiler is named gjc, not javac; they don't do the same thing, but then different Schemes are not exactly plug-replaceable either.

@Earnestly: I don't think anyone else (certainly no other Scheme) uses the name petite.

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That leaves scheme-script then, which is unchanged with InstallSchemeName.

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@johnwcowan: I'm not especially familiar with the /etc/alternatives system, but it seems obvious from a quick read of the update-alternatives man page that each alternative for any given command has to have a unique path, not filename. Maybe all your problems could be solved pretty simply if #6 / #16 were fixed and you could then set up symlinks into the install directory using whatever names you like?

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@jltaylor-us: Yes, in principle I could install every Scheme into a separate install path, and then flipflop either /etc/alternatives or my own symlinks like crazy. The fact is, I don't have to in any other case, and I shouldn't have to here, and given the install option, I don't have to. I also removed the MIT Scheme symlink, and "scheme" on my system now runs a script that shows concisely the startup invocations for all my Schemes.

@Earnestly: I certainly hope nobody depends on scheme-script, which is only provided for compatibility with non-normative Appendix D of R6RS, written at a time when R6RS was expected to have a much broader reach, and compatibility between R6RS systems was expected to be closer than it actually is.

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