Please add GNU id-utils to Fedora

[Pádraig Brady]

On 05/11/2012 09:14 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Miloslav Trmač wrote:
>> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Greg McGary <greg.mcgary at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Minor conflict: the name of one of id-utils main commands "lid" is also the
>>> same as an existing command, though installed in a different place.  id-utils
>>> has /usr/bin/lid, while libuser has /usr/sbin/lid.
>>
>> Yeah, that's come up before.  There's no great solution I'm afraid,
>> one or the other will have to change
> 
> Technically there is no need to change a name.
> In Debian, one can have two lid programs installed, one in /usr/bin
> and the other in /usr/sbin[*], so why not in Fedora?
> 
> Sure, a different solution would be better, but renaming a command like
> idutils' lid (in use by some for >15 years) does not seem reasonable.
> 
> Any opinions on whether this issue is big enough to NAK
> a review request or addition of the package to Fedora?

Well /usr/sbin is proposed to be merged with /usr/bin in Fedora 18

Anyway I think having the same name in different paths is too problematic.

id-utils (1996) seems to predate libuser (2001), so it's
unfortunate that libuser picked the clashing name.

I'm not sure what to suggest though.
The simplest is to rename the id-utils lid on fedora,
which will not break anything, but does introduce awkwardness
in future script portability, needing something like:
  lid-utils > /dev/null && LID=lid-utils || LID=lid
/etc/alternatives probably isn't appropriate as I'm
assuming the commands do not overlap in functionality.

cheers,
Pádraig.