Re: FTP Installation & Package Naming Conventions

[Alexander S A Kjeldaas <astor@stud.unit.no>]

On Tue, 31 Oct 1995, brian (b.c.) white wrote:

> I propose we standardize the filenames used in the Debian distribution and
> suggest what I mentioned above:
> 
> 	package-name-version-revision.deb
> 
> with the following restrictions:
> 
> 1) The package name must not contain any "-<digit>" substrings.  This is
>    important in order to be able to tell where the name ends and the
>    version number starts.
>
> 2) The version number must start with a digit (see #1, above) but may contain
>    letters and dashes thereafter.
> 
> 3) The revision number must be of the form "-<digits>".
> 
> 4) All pieces must exactly match the information given in the control file.
> 
> 
> For you regular expression guru's, this should amount to
> 
> 	^(.*)-([0-9].*)-([0-9]*).deb$	\1=name, \2=version, \3=revision
> 

Alternatively:

1) The package name should be at least one character long.

2) The version number should not contain the '-' character (and should be 
at least one character long?)

I think that would be more flexible and allow constructs like

something-pre1.1-1 - where the version can start with non digit
emacs-19-19.30.2-1 - where the package can contain '-<digit>' substring. 

3) The revision number should not contain the '-' characterm (and should 
be at least one character long )

4) The name, version and revision part of the filename should be 
separated with a '-' character.

5) As 4) above

Which would give the following regexp:

 ^(.*)-([^-]*)-([^-]+).deb$

Which is an easy regexp and is easily parsed starting from the end of the 
construct.


The benefit of your regexp as I see it is the following:

- You can include '-' in the version.

   I don't think this is important. The numeric part of versionnumbers
should be separated by '.'. Words like 'pre', 'beta' etc. should be
possible to insert anywhere. 

astor
-