Why $ xmlstarlet and not just $ xml as in the man?

[Vincent Lefevre]

Hi,

On 2011-04-08 03:10:38 -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> Perhaps "xmlstarlet" used to be called "xml" but was later renamed.

No, its official name has always been "xml", but it seems that there
are some inconsistences on upstream's side.

With MacPorts, the name of the binary is xmlstarlet just because of

  --program-transform-name=s/xml$/${name}/

in the Portfile. Debian now has something similar (still the bug in
the man page, though). But there were already problems back in 2005:

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=312932

> "xml" is a fairly generic kind of program name, so they probably ran
> into problems with other existing programs of that name.

Upstream probably didn't run into problems, but a less generic name
is preferred on various distributions.

> I've updated the port from 1.0.1_1 to 1.1.0_0; in this version, the
> developer updated the message printed by "xmlstarlet --help" to
> correctly show that the command name is "xmlstarlet" not "xml".
> However the manpage and many other documentation files still list
> the program name as "xml". I fixed the reference in the manpage in
> 1.1.0_1, but you should report this problem to the developers of
> xmlstarlet so they can fix all occurrences of the problem.

As said above, this is a MacPorts specific bug (unless upstream can
add rules to modified the documentation when --program-transform-name
is used). Alternatively, suggesting upstream to change the binary
name from xml to xmlstarlet (as done by Debian and MacPorts) would
be a good idea, IMHO. Users who wish a shorter name for interactive
use can still define a shell alias or anything similar.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arénaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)