package variant name
I was reading up about gentoo's portage system, i think we can learn a
thing or two from them.
"In addition Portage supports the concept of SLOTs. In the development of
Gentoo Linux its developers often found that we needed to have multiple
versions of certain packages (such as libraries) installed to satisfy the
demands of other packages. The traditional approach to solving this
problem has been to treat different versions of the same package as
different packages with slightly different names."
Ref http://www.gentoo.org/doc/portage-manual.html
I think they raise a valid point, we do mangle our package names to make
them unique.
Example: not picking on nano, its just the first one i ran across.
Package: nano
Package: nano-tiny
Package: nano-tiny-utf8
The upstream name is nano, we create the debian extensions -tiny and
-tiny-utf8 to make the name unique so our packaging system can handle
different build configurations.
It would be more idealistic if we seperate the upstream name and the
debian extension into seperate fields to keep it clear.
Im not sure about the best way to do it, it could be done by introducing
two new fields, and preserving the Package: field for use as the
combination of the two fields.
e.g.
Upstream-name: nano
Variant: tiny
I appreciate its probably something that is unlikely to change becasue it
would only have a superficial benefit, thought it was worth mentioning
anyway.
Glenn
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