Re: FTP Installation & Package Naming Conventions
ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk (Ian Jackson) wrote on 01.11.95 in <[🔎] m0tAlxx-0002ZxC@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>:
> brian white writes ("FTP Installation & Package Naming Conventions "):
> I'm not convinced that it's a good idea to try to encode the package
> name and version unambiguously into the filename, but I do see that it
> would be very convenient.
Well, if you want to find out what's on the FTP site, you can't very well
fetch each package first and look inside.
On the other hand, it should be possible to make a list available on the
FTP site that contained all the info - a simple list of filenames versus
properly parsed package name/version/revision would do, especially if a
similar file can easily be got for the local installation.
Incidentally, I've been meaning to ask - how do you make a Packages file?
Wouldn't it be a good idea if one could regenerate one locally?
> No, it only looked trunctated in the output from dpkg --list and in
> dselect's package listing. This is to avoid making too much of a mess
> of the formatting.
>
> I should change this, probably.
Well, there should be a _simple_ way to get the exact names.
> There should be no maximum length.
That would, of course, be preferrable.
> The sorting implications are very different, and this is important
> because dpkg and dselect can be reluctant to downgrade packages.
Are these documented somewhere, by the way?
MfG Kai
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