Warren's Package Naming Proposal - Revision 2
Dag Wieers
dag at wieers.com
Sat Nov 8 01:30:25 UTC 2003
On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Warren Togami wrote:
> XXX:
> Should we actively discourage packages that *appear* to be plugin,
> add-on or theme packages but are actually completely independent? One
> example that has caught me off guard lately was Dag's mozilla-firebird
> package. While Dag published mozilla-firebird, fedora.us decided
> against a name change from MozillaFirebird to mozilla-firebird for these
> reasons:
> 1) No reason to change.
> 2) Mozilla branding strategy document said the name was changing "soon"
> anyway, (which still hasn't happened.)
> 3) mozilla-firebird is within the long implicitly understood and
> fedora.us codified standard of being a component or add-on to "mozilla",
> which is clearly wrong in this case.
> #2 and #3 were the strongest arguments in my opinion.
>
> I can't think of any other past examples off the top of my head, but I
> really want to avoid these kinds of instances in the future if
> possible. Please express your opinions.
> XXX
You say it *appears* to be a plugin, and I think that's the problem. There
is already a multitude of packages that start off with the same base and
are not plugins or add-ons per se. eg.
amanda vs. amanda-client (one can be used without the other)
bind vs. bind-utils
compat-*
control-center vs. control-panel (no connection)
desktop-backgrounds-basic vs. desktop-file-utils
...
They all appear to be plugins (if you only think of that rule) yet we
don't urge to change. So #3 is not an exclusive rule, just a guideline for
packagers. It never said that it only could be plugins though.
#1 doesn't make a difference if you start off adopting a name. I never
adopted 'MozillaFirebird' for several reasons (mixed casing is one of
them, Debian and Mandrake's decision is another one). If Fedora started
off adopting mozilla-firebird, there was no need to change the name
either.
And the branding doesn't dictate to use mixed casing or the elimination
of the standard seperator '-'. Only that it is called 'mozilla firebird'
and not just 'firebird'. Everybody knows why ;) So #2 doesn't really
convince me. I had to call it mozilla-firebird, without casing and with a
proper seperator.
The only reason to adopt 'MozillaFirebird' is because the tarball is
called that way. And although it is important to consider that name first,
there are a lot of other considerations to be made, like mixed casing,
what other distro's do, is it a plugin/add-on, is it a library for
python/perl/php, what is the pragmatic thing to do.
If you want to avoid this kind of clashes, it would be better to not allow
upper-case in package-names and to forbid other seperators than '-' (not _
or '').
Kind regards,
-- dag wieers, dag at wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
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