On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 9:43 PM, Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> wrote: >>> So far we’ve resisted the temptation, and it’s rarely been an issue. >>> :-) >> >> Could you elaborate on the down sides? (I'm not trying to insist, but to >> learn.) > > Basically it’s good to stick to what GCC does, and GCC does not install > ‘cc’. There’s a subjective aesthetic downside: it’s good to spread the > ‘g’. And also, it turns out to work for 99% of the packages.
OK, I thought you were referring to technical reasons... A different look at aesthetics: Back in the mid '90, when Linux was still an underground curiosity, many UNIX admins were starting to install GNU user-land applications. To avoid name clashes with the vendor versions of programs they were prefixing all GNU applications with a 'g'. So, the GNU version of 'ls' was named 'gls', 'awk' -> 'gawk', ... Now on GNU/Linux systems there's no need for such prefixing and, for consistency and to send a message, you may just name the C compiler with the traditional name 'cc' which means: Hey, this is the official system C compiler and of course, it's the GNU one. Regards, Fede
