Re: Package and package file naming and versioning

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

Bruce Perens writes ("Re:  Package and package file naming and versioning (was: Re:     underscores)"):
...
> > From: Bill Mitchell <mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com>
> > And what chars, if any, are to be disallowed in debian revision numbers?
>
> Underbar, white space, and shell metacharacters. The same goes for package
> names.

Please don't take this as a canonical answer :-).

The current list of *allowed* characters in package names is letters,
digits and the three punctuation characters `-' (hyphen) `+' (plus)
and `.' (stop).  This is enforced by dpkg-deb --build.

There isn't currently a spec for characters allowed in version
numbers, but I'm strongly tempted to suggest the use of the same set,
plus colon.  (Clearly there ought to be some spec.)

Colon is required as it is the character which is used by the new
epochs mechanism used for digging oneself out of version number holes.
AFAICT noone is using this yet, so there is still time to change it,
but only to +, I think, as . and - are already much used.

The only package currently using a characters not in this set in its
version is udbmpeg_play (2.3_patched-2), whose package name needs
fixing anyway.

Ian.