Re: FTP Installation & Package Naming Conventions

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

(Moved to debian-devel)

Raul Miller writes ("Re: FTP Installation & Package Naming Conventions"):
> If you lose track of the architecture on an executable, you can use
> 'file' to figure things out.  I suppose it would be nice to have some
> similar mechanism for debian packages.  Ian, how about a target
> architecture field in the control file?

I can do that.  I'll think about exactly what its format and semantics
should be and post when I have some ideas.

> Well, ideally it would be nice to have a routine which renames debian
> packages based on their control files.  Once this is written, it might
> be meaningful to say that files on the ftp site have had this run on
> them with some standard set of options...

For the information to be encoded reversibly we need to do one of two
things:

1. Insist that no packages contain hyphens immediately followed by
digits in their name, and that no version numbers start with
non-digts.

2. Use another convention for separating the version and revision.
There are relatively few safe metacharacters here - I'd be inclined
simply to double up the existing hyphen, so that we have something
like
  texinfo-doc--3.6-5

Ian.