Re: Perl modules naming in Debian
Adam Byrtek <alpha@student.uci.agh.edu.pl> writes:
> I'm new on this list, so excuse me if my question is quite obvious.
> I'm a bit courious why Perl modules in Debian are called
> libxxx-perl, and not libperl-xxx. IMO the second style would make
> them a lot easier to find and browse!
Ah, an opportunity to do a little fun archaeology.
The reason is, as they would say on p5p, "Hysterical Raisins".
The first outboard library package was libwww-perl, which is really
named libwww-perl upstream. Originally packaged in June, 1996 by Rob
Browning (for the Debian 1.1 release, aka "buzz"), I took it over in
September of 1996 and converted it to the then-new new source format
for the 1.2 release (aka "rex"). At roughly the same time I created a
package for libnet.
In March 1997, upstream libnet author Graham Barr (a Debian user)
asked me to rename the libnet package to libnet-perl, since he'd
recently become aware of a C libnet, and he was planning to change the
name of his library upstream---not that he ever did. :-)
So our first two perl library package both had upstream names more or
less in that form. After a while an informal consensus developed, and
by the time a more formal policy was written, the overwhelming weight
of history landed on the side of lib*-perl. I believe we dealt with
the last outlier, mailtools, when a new maintainer willing to put up
with the hassles of name changes took it over from me last year.
I don't think your suggested names would make things easier to find,
per se, since the current scheme is regular, but your scheme would,
indeed, make them all bunch up in dpkg listings and be easier to
browse. However, I would suggest that at this late date, your better
bet would be to get familiar with grep-available. :-)
Mike.
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