Package naming rules.

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

Until now, I have been silent on this issue. Working on upgrade issues and
learning perl, have brought me to a place where I now have a strong
opinion.

The problem:

In order to determine whether a package is already installed at the
archive version level, I need to see what version is in the archive. I do
this with a line like: ls /doc/man*.deb |grep -w man. This works well to
distinguish between man and manpage packages, but doesn't work at all to
distinguish between libc4 and libc4-dev. This is because grep identifies
the '-' as a word separator, and rightly so. This SHOULD be the word
separator to delimit version from package name.

The solution:

Since other utilities than grep follow the same rules for word separators
it seems only prudent to not allow word separators within a package name.
As the underscore ('_') character is not considered a word separator (at
least by grep, that's the only test I have made) I strongly suggest that
all dash ('-') characters in package names be replaced by underscore ('_')
characters.

Any objections?

Dwarf

------------                                          --------------

aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (904) 877-0257
      Flexible Software              Fax:     NONE 
      Black Creek Critters           e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net

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