Request for review/sponsor - NEdit

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 03 Jun 2005 10:22:57 -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".

This is insane. Most applications are referred to with mixed-case names
(gThumb, GQview, The GIMP, for example).  If that guideline referred to
the package description, I would agree. But for the package name, it's
best to prefer lower-case as much as possible. Else you likely see users
run into trouble with collation order upon querying repositories in search
of their favourite application packages. As soon as a package adds virtual
"Provides: SoMeoTHErnAMe" just to allow for alternative mixed-case
spelling, that indicates there's a naming problem.

> 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.

Tarball, all patches, all files use the lower-case naming scheme.
Only with your added NEdit.spec, the case-mixture has started.

> 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?

I think that "rule" ought to be kicked of off the page. Unless there is
really good reason to use mixed-case package names (like trademarks
guidelines requiring a specific spelling), every package name ought to be
lower-case only.