Warren's Package Naming Proposal - Revision 2

[Dag Wieers]

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]