Re: MBF alert: packages with very long source / .deb filenames

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 08:56:14AM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Mar 2011, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 12:28:54PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> > >Steve McIntyre wrote:
> > >> There are uses I've heard about, including (apparently quite common)
> > >> using CDs and DVDs to seed a mirror on a Windows server.
> > >
> > >If I had to chose between that working, and not needing to worry about
> > >filename lengths, I'd choose the latter.
> > 
> > We already have arbitrary limits on filename length (~200 bytes or so
> > on RockRidge), even before this. I'm just proposing to lower them for
> > a common use case. Do we really care about supporting *very* long
> > names here?
> 
> I think so. The package with long names tend to follow a naming policy
> that sort of imposes the long name... so if we put a too-short limit
> then we're asking them to make an exception in the naming policy.

Yes.

OTOH, do you really want to type
"apt-get install package-with-policy-compliant-utterly-long-silly-name"?
There's a point when package name lengths become problematic, and that
isn't just true for ISO images.

-- 
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the following formula:

pi zz a