Please change the name of the binary /usr/sbin/bat for bacula or bacula-bat

There is a very popular package called bat that uses the same binary name as bacula, except on Debian and derivatives, where it has to use batcat to not conflict with bacula's bat.

Debian doesn't allow 2 different packages sharing the same file/binary name for consistency across the distribution, which extends to all Debian derivatives, like Ubuntu, Mint, and others.

I'd like to politely ask about the possibility of changing your software binary name to something like bacula or bacula-bat so it would free the bat name to be used by the bat package and make it consistent across all distributions of the package.

Here is the relevant issue tracker on bat's side: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/2455

And here is my relevant comment there:

I think our best bet to solve this issue would be trying to convince bacula developers to change the /usr/sbin/bat filename upstream, maybe to /usr/sbin/bacula-bat.

So after a version of Debian with the bat command free, the bat project could make use of it on the next release.

Example: Debian Bookworm: /usr/sbin/bat is part of bacula-console-qt (/usr/bin/bat is free) Debian Trixie: both /usr/sbin/bat and /usr/bin/bat are free (to avoid confusion for upgrading bacula users to mistakenly run the wrong software) Debian Forky: /usr/bin/bat is part of the bat package

In the transitional release (Trixie in this example) we could also replace the /usr/bin/bat (and symlink /usr/sbin/bat to it) with some info about this.

Something like:

#!/usr/bin/sh
echo 'This command used to be part of the "bacula-console-qt" package, and it's going to be part of the "bat" package on the next stable version of Debian.'
echo 'If you want to use the previous bat command from bacula-console-qt, please run "bacula-bat" as root.'
echo 'If you want to use the cat-like command from the bat package, please run "batcat".'
echo
echo 'You can also add an alias or a symlink for either of these commands. Example:'
echo
echo 'Alias:'
echo "echo 'alias bat="/usr/bin/batcat"' >> ~/.bashrc"
echo 'Local symlink for your user only:'
echo 'ln -s /usr/bin/batcat ~/.local/bin/bat'
echo
echo 'Symlink for the whole system (needs root permission):'
echo 'ln -s /usr/bin/batcat /usr/bin/bat'
echo 'or for bacula:'
echo 'ln -s /usr/sbin/bacula-bat /usr/sbin/bat'