Re: Parsing package filenames (was: Re: New ftp method for dselect)

["Michael K. Johnson" <johnsonm@nigel.vnet.net>]

Bill Mitchell writes:
>The most reasonable approach seems to me (of course) to be the one
>which I've been arguing -- a naming standard very close to current
>practice, minimizing package renaming, and minimizing mangling of 
>upstream naming and versioning.

Let me throw another idea in the pot.  A has been pointed out, any
naming system invites violations in upstream names or versions.
Why not do what Red Hat has done, and have a site exec command to
return the header (dpkg --info <package>) which can be called on
packages with unweildy names.  This isn't *instead of* the other
suggestions, but allows for the unweildy cases without contortions.
As far as I can tell, you either have filesystem access to packages,
in which case you can call dpkg directly, or you have ftp access,
in which case you could call a site exec command to differentiate.

Food for thought.  There are plenty of arguments to be made against
it, one of which is "but what if the site foo doesn't enable the
site exec command?", but it's worth consideration.

michaelkjohnson