Russ Allbery wrote: > This is a Policy proposal that's sat in the Policy bug queue with > wording and seconds for quite some time. I'd like to resurrect it and > resolve it one way or the other. There's some room for clarification here. I think it is apparent from comments given in 2001 the that the policy wish-bug under debate concerns the _binary_ package name, and not the _source_ package name. The Debian policy however isn't entirely clear on whether it intends to mandate the source or binary package name or both. Let me repeat its current text: | 4.2 Module Package Names | | Perl module packages should be named for the primary module provided. | The naming convention for module Foo::Bar is libfoo-bar-perl. Packages | which include multiple modules may additionally include provides for | those modules using the same convention. I think that from the final sentence it can be inferred that it primarily intends to mandate the _binary_ package name. So while we're discussing the binary package naming, maybe we can decide whether the mandate should be extended to the _source_ package name as well while we're at it, and clarify the Perl policy to explicitly state whether or not the source package name is covered by the policy's recommendation. I know the question of source package naming for Perl modules has been discussed on debian-perl before, but that was just about the Debian Perl Group's own conventions, not about the global Perl policy. The Perl Group can still maintain stricter conventions even if the Perl policy gets relaxed with regard to source package names. As far as _binary_ package names are concerned, I think they should follow an automatable pattern (i.e. the Perl policy's recommendation for binary package names should stay as it is). Long package names are a non-issue given Bash completion and package managers with incremental search features. As for _source_ package names, I think they should be free-form.
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