RFC: Naming guidelines for packages extending GIMP

[Ewan Mac Mahon]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 11:28:50AM +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> during the review of the resynthesizer plugin for GIMP
> [ https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=250210 ], I asked the
> package to be named "gimp-plugin-resynthesizer" rather than
> "gimp-resynthesizer". Ewan brought up the point that there isn't really
> a naming guideline for it, therefore I'd like to propose one:
> 
The name gimp-resynthesizer was chosen by applying the generic case of
the package naming guidelines which cover anything that's not special
cased.

> If a package provides several distinct features that have value of their
> own (use your own discretion on that), it must ship them as separate
> subpackages. In that case, the source package is named
> "gimp-extension-<collectionname>" where <collectionname> is a sensible
> name for the collection (see examples).
> 
> That's all of the different kinds of extensions for GIMP I can think
> about right now, feel free to add to the list ;-). For packages that
> contain e.g. a plugin and some brushes, I would separate them into
> subpackages if it is sensible to do so. If not, I would name the package
> after the main feature (in this case, likely "gimp-plugin-..."

I think there are two related problems with this approach; from a user's
perspective it's useful to know that a package is a gimp addon, but not
all that useful to know whether it is implemented using a plugin, a
script, brushes, or some combination of them. From a developers point of
view it creates situations where it's not entirely clear how a package
containing several different components should be named, or whether a
package containing several components designed to be used together, but
potentially useful apart should be split or not. There's also the
potential to create inconsistency as people decide differently.

Essentially the package name is too short to accurately describe the
range of possibilities, so the best approach is to not try, and mislead,
but to simply leave it as 'gimp-addon' and put the details in the
description field.
 
> Please comment.
> 
> Ewan also expressed concern about the proliferation of package
> specific naming guidelines. Tell me what you think about that as well.
>
In general I think the existing naming guidelines for addons work pretty
well, and it's only worth making an exception if there's a really good
case, such as pre-existing convention (e.g. CPAN naming for perl
modules), or where a single 'parent' has so many addons that it's useful
to classify them. I don't think either of those things are the case
here.

Short version: I don't think this is a terrible idea, I do think it's
somewhat overkill, and on balance the downsides outweigh the upsides.

Ewan

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