Suggestion: rename "killall" to "fkill", but wait five years to phase the new name in

[Jason Spiro]

Craig Small <csmall <at> enc.com.au> writes:

> On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 01:31:02AM -0500, Jason A. Spiro wrote:
> 
> Hello Jason (and the FreeBSD folk),
> 
> The problem for me is that killall in Linux has been called that for a
> very long time now. psmisc came out 11 years ago and before that killall
> was in procps. I'm not sure when but the copyright message says 1994.
> 
> That's 16 years or more of people getting very used to killall doing
> what it does and being called killall.  I know of the problem you refer
> to having administered Solaris servers before, but changing the name now
> will cause more problems than it solves.

What problems will it cause, other than a torrent of complaints?

> > Craig, and hackers, are you both willing to do this?
> 
> I'm not. Even though I just got a new SATA drive its not big enough to
> handle the torrent of emails from people saying "why did i do that" and
> "who cares about Solaris" etc etc if I did change it.

I can create a special email address for this, you can mention "Complaints to"
and the new address in the warning message, and I can try to reply to everyone.
 I will make use of form letters whenever it makes sense to.

> Sounds like its a no from FreeBSD folk too.  In fact to me its more
> important my various programs look the same(ish) across the Linux
> distributions and to FreeBSD than they are to Solaris.
[snip]

I will reply to Xin's "no" message later.  I agree that it's a good idea that
you and the FreeBSD folk should use the same name for the same utility.