Bug#486453: Policy 8.2 suggests libraryname-tools, but not libraryname-utils

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Fabian Greffrath <greffrath@leat.rub.de> writes:

> However, in practice the -utils suffix for the discussed type of
> packages seems to be much more widely used than the -tools suffix that
> is suggested by policy 8.2. On my system I get the following results:
>
> $ dpkg -l \*-tools | wc -l
> 27
>
> $ dpkg -l \*-utils | wc -l
> 38
>
> I propose a change in the wording of the last sentence, maybe to something
> like this:
>
> This package might typically be named libraryname-utils or (at your
> option) libraryname-tools; note the absence of the soversion in the
> package name.

I suppose we could, but does it really matter?  We already changed it from
-runtime to -tools because almost no one uses -runtime, but -tools and
-utils are close enough that I'm not sure there's any real difference.

> However, if this would be a real recommendation regarding the package
> name for run-time support programs, we would need many transitional
> -utils packages poiting to many newly introduced -tools packages in the
> archive to become policy compliant. ;)

Which is why it's not and won't be.  Hence the "might typically be named"
wording.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>