Policy or Limitation

[Keita Maehara <maehara@debian.org>]

I have some questions regarding current Debian packaging system.

1. package name

The Debian policy manual section 2.3.1. says:

| Package names may only consist of lower case letters, digits (0-9),
|  plus (+) or minus (-) signs, and periods (.).

But the reason is not mentioned here. Some upstream sources use upper
case letters for their name and we may also want to use upper case
letters for our packages. Why can't we use upper case letters?

Is this policy or limitation?

(It may due to MS-DOS (Windows 95) style file name and once we had
MS-DOS style file name support (msdos-i386) indeed, but it has been
dropped.)

2. upstream sources

If multiple upstream sources are needed to build a package, we have to
integrate them into only one source, namely
"<package>_<upstreamversion>.orig.tar.gz" (".orig" may be dropped).

And we cannot use pristine upstream source if it unpacks its contents
directly into current directory, or badly named (from a Debian's point
of view) directory and so on.

Is this policy or limitation?

I do know that we can use pristine upstream sources in a limited
situation, but it is not sufficient, IMHO.

3. patches

If multiple patches (including Debian patch) are needed to build a
package, we have to integrate them into only one patch, namely
<package>_<upstream>-<debianversion>.diff.gz.

Is this policy or limitation?

To support 2. and 3. style sources, we have to describe a procedure
somewhere to unpack multiple sources into a proper directory and apply
multiple patches in a certain order, though.

--
Keita Maehara <maehara@debian.org>