On Sat, Apr 11, 1998 at 08:57:49PM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Apr 1998, Juan Cespedes wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 11, 1998 at 04:36:14PM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> > > I am not on the policy mailing list, so please cc me on this thread.
> > > Does/Should the policy manual detail which letters may, or may not, be
> > > upper or lower case?
> > I think so.
> I know ;-)
I tend to also. One of the things I like about Debian is its consistency --
packages tend to follow the same rules. Having one package have
/doc/x/ChangeLog, and another /doc/y/CHANGELOG, and a third /doc/z/changlog
would mess that up somwhat, IMHO.
My other inclination is that since Unix's filesystem *is* case sensitive,
when you specify a filename, you're specifying a specific case of that
filename.
> What it does, from my point of view as a developer, is to add unnecessary
> clutter to what was, previously, a straightforward deal.
Would adding a
ln -s ChangeLog.gz /usr/doc/xyzzy/changelog.gz
to your rules file as David Engel suggested be acceptable? It complies
with the letter of policy and doesn't force you to change the upstream
documentation.
> [...] Dpkg is perfectly happy with PACKAGE:, Package:, or
> package: as the header for a package entry. To make the script function in
> that environment I made every buffer that was used for comparisons, get
> built with "tolower".
>
> Why are we trying to be more strict than that here?
IMHO, because we're don't have control of the parser here -- the filesystem
has already been written, and it's case sensitive.
> Consistent with what? I prefer consistency with upstream source.
I think consistency of the end system is more important.
> I guess that I see no reason why policy on names should, necessarily,
> demand case identity, and certainly not in this kind of situation.
The other thing, which I neglected to state specifically earlier, was that
when writing a tool to find a filename case sensitively you can just use
"fopen()", or its equivalent. When you remove the case sensitivity, you
need to get a file listing, and "strcasecmp()" every file you find against
what you want.
Unless we were to specify that changelog's should be one of: changelog.gz
ChangeLog.gz or CHANGELOG.gz, perhaps. Which seems, to me, fairly pointless
when you can simply add an ln -s or a mv to your rules file. YMMV. And
probably does. :-/
(that said, I am inclined to prefer the symlink approach to the mv approach,
at the very least that'll keep it reasonably obvious what's going on when
upstream docs say something like "Please refer to the ChangeLog file
included with this program", or similar)
> _-_-_-_-_- Author of "The Debian Linux User's Guide" _-_-_-_-_-_-
At a complete tangent, is this online somewhere?
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``It's not a vision, or a fear. It's just a thought.''
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