Re: FTP Installation & Package Naming Conventions

["brian (b.c.) white" <bcwhite@bnr.ca>]

>While I prefer numeric versions, that's not that crucial for parsing.  
>However, I would strongly suggest using names (and of course revisions)  
>without dashes. You can't mandate anything for versions, as those aren't  
>choosen by Debian.
>
>That gives
>
>        ^([^-]*)-(.*)-([^-]*)\.deb$      \1=name, \2=version, \3=revision
>
>which is quite easy to parse even "by hand": everything in front of the  
>first dash is the name, everything between the first and the last dash is  
>the version, everything between the last dash and ".deb" is the revision.

Dashes within package names are basically required because of things like
"emacs" and "emacs-el".  Changing this is likely to upset a lot of people,
which makes it difficult to convince the Debian guys to enforce this.

Also, while the versions are not choosen by Debian, the format in which
they are written could be.  It really makes little difference whether it
is called "bison-A2.5-0.deb" or "bison-2.5A-0.deb".


>However, your list raises another problem - what maximal lenght for the  
>three components should be supported? The named clearly had its version  
>string truncated.

Yes.

                                        Brian
                                 ( bcwhite@bnr.ca )

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    In theory, theory and practice are the same.  In practice, they're not.