Request for review/sponsor - NEdit

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 10:22 -0500, Ian Pilcher wrote:
> Paul Howarth wrote:
> The package naming guidelines at
> > http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageNamingGuidelines suggest to
> > stick to lower case unless the upstream package uses upper case, which
> > is not the case for either the tarball name or the installed binary?
> 
> Actually, that page says:
> 
>    Keep in mind to respect the wishes of the upstream maintainers. If
>    they refer to their application as "ORBit", you should use "ORBit" as
>    the package name, and not "orbit".
> 
> If you look at http://nedit.org (or http://NEdit.org; hostnames are
> case insensitive), you'll see that the program is consistently referred
> to as "NEdit".  The binary is named "nedit", but the ORBit binaries also
> use lower case names

ORBit uses both orbit and ORBit.  ORBit is in shared libraries and
pkg-config files while the helper programs use orbit*.

Does NEdit store any files on the filesystem with the capitalization?

> > Also, the package has historically been known as "nedit" in earlier
> > Fedora Core and Red Hat releases, so if it does get renamed then I would
> > suggest Obsoleting and Providing "nedit" for a clean upgrade path.
> 
> Umm, I did that.
> 
> I don't have a strong feeling either way.  ("nedit" is certainly easier
> to type.)  However, it is frustrating to try to follow the documented
> rules, only to be told that they're not really the rules.
> 
> Can someone please clarify?

To me, what's written on the web page is one of the lesser criteria for
deciding whether a package should be capitalized.  Web pages are
directed at people who are reading and normal grammar rules apply there.
Software can have a given name which would be capitalized in that realm.
Tarballs, binary names, and to me, rpm packages are directed at people
interacting with the computer in a different way.  In that realm, using
uppercase is the exception rather than the rule and should be used
sparingly.

If the tarball and binary are both lowercase, I would make the rpm
package name lowercase as well.  If both of those are uppercase then
uppercase the package name.  If there's disagreement (for instance,
Pyrex whose main binary is pyrexc) then the packager has the right to be
confused :-)  [Pyrex has a python module which is Pyrex, which I think
tips the balance towards the use of caps.]

-Toshio
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