Bug#735134: perl: rename(1) is ancient

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Sat, Feb 08, 2014 at 05:23:32PM -0500, Jay Berkenbilt wrote:
> Back in 2004 before I was a debian developer, I was looking to package a
> script I wrote called patmv.  patmv was inspired by rename perl but has
> slightly different behavior.  You can find the thread about it here:
> 
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2004/04/msg00391.html
> 
> The upshot of the discussion was that people objected to having a
> package for a single script even though there seemed to be general
> agreement that what it did was useful.  It was suggested at the time
> that I try to get the script added to the renameutils package, but I
> never pursued that.
> 
> If you would be interested in including patmv in your package or in
> following up on the idea of having it included in renameutils, I can
> supply patmv.  I should put it online anyway in case anyone would find
> it useful.
> 
> Basically the main difference between rename and my patmv script is that
> patmv keeps track of renames that it has already done and tries to
> operate on the last path element unless the -w flag is given.  So, for
> example, if you wanted to take an entire directory and recursively make
> it lower-case, you can do that with patmv.  Here is a quick
> illustration:

[snip]

> If anyone is interested, I will take a few minutes and stick this with
> in a github repository.  I also write a manual page for it when I was
> planning on packaging it.

The version of rename we are now talking about using (rather than the
version shipped in $perl/debian/rename) is now maintained on CPAN:

http://search.cpan.org/~rmbarker/File-Rename-0.20/

It might be that a good place for patmv is that distribution (upstream);
after all we don't want to add patmv as another debian-specific auxilliary
file in another package, since that's what we're trying to get away from.

My impression is that the aversion to small packages is somewhat less
these days; certainly the CPAN distributions result in a large number of
quite small packages, and the benefits of modularised code distribution
probably outweigh the disadvantages of the numbers of packages in this
case. However I think I'd still talk to the CPAN maintainer of File-Rename
next if it was me.

Cheers,
Dominic.