Re: Bug#114920: [PROPOSAL] remove foolish consistency in perl module names
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> Package: debian-policy
>
> Rationalle:
>
> Perl policy currently dictates that a perl module package have a name of
> the form lib-foo-bar-perl, where "foo-bar" maps to Foo:Bar in the perl
> module name. This is resulting in a lot of very large and awkward
> package names -- the worst ofender so far is the longest named package
> in the entire distribution: libbusiness-onlinepayment-bankofamerica-perl
>
> There are a lot of other very long package names that result from this
> foolish consistency, and indeed perl module packages make up 1/5th of
> all the packages with names in excess of 25 characters. Reducing the
> size of these packages names will thus have a large impact on the length
> of Debian's package names in general; this in turn has many ramificatons
> large and small everywhere users deal with or are exposed to package
> names. (Typing in "libbusiness-onlinepayment-bankofamerica-perl" is not
> fun. Neither is seeing it truncated to 20 characters in dpkg -l.)
IMHO this is a particular braindead problem of dpkg anyway.
It should honour the COLUMNS setting and give the full name
to a pipe.
>
> At the same time, this consistency of package names can indeed be very
> useful, when things are being automated, and we shouldn't lose that
> benefit with foolish inconsistency.
>
>
> Proposal:
>
> Replace section 3.2 of the perl sub-policy included with Debian policy
> with the following text:
>
> Packages which contain perl modules should provide virtual packages
> that correspond to the primary module or modules in the package. The
> naming convention is that for module 'Foo::Bar', the package should
> provide 'libfoo-bar-perl'. This may be used as the package's name if
> the result is not too long and cumbersome. Or the package's name may
> be an abbreviated version, and the longer name put in the Provides
> field.
This is indeed a _very_ good idea.
Ciao
Racke
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