Re: Package naming rules.

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

On Tue, 7 May 1996, David Engel wrote:

> > 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?
> 
> I thought this was already decided.  Package names will continue to
> use hypens ('-'), but they will be converted to underscores ('_') when
> used in file names.  You won't even have to bother with word
> separators.  Just check for <package>-*.
> 
Well, it may have been decided but it hasn't been implemented :-)
Check out every library package that has a -dev or -pic tacked on.
I would also point out that libc5-dev is not only the package name in the
file name, but also the package name reported by dpkg -s. So why is
sh-utils declared to be shellutils by dpkg -s? I had assumed that the
reason ld.so was named ldso internally was because dpkg didn't want a '.'
in the name.
These inconsistancies in the internal and external names have broader
reach than my personal problem. New user confusion is just a symtom of
what is wrong with this lack of consistancy.
David, with respect to the last two lines in your above response: grep,
the perl instruction split, as well as other tools do what they do with an
understanding of what constitutes a word separator. If I use one of these
tools, I then have to figure out how to put package names back together if
they contain word separation characters!
It seems to me to be very bad form, as well as bad design, to not take
into consideration the needs of commonly used tools provided by the OS (I
read distribution=OS in most cases) when dealing with issues like this
one.
There appears to be an understood definition about what constitutes word
separation characters among all the tools I have used so far (admittedly
not many) so it seems to me that being consistant with that definition
when building file names or package names is a desirable requirement.

Thanks for your time,

Dwarf

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aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (904) 877-0257
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      Black Creek Critters           e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net

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