[Fedora-packaging] Naming Policy (first draft)

[Panu Matilainen]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 23:17 +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>
>> Some comments after a quick read-through:
>>
>> 1) Version and release-tags: Package version should obviously follow
>> upstream version in normal, sane cases but especially things like 1.0-
>> pre1 need special rules to handle without epochs, those should be
>> covered in this doc. The old fedora.us packaging guidelines doc, section
>> C-3 (http://www.fedora.us/wiki/PackageNamingGuidelines) pretty much
>> covers these cases if you drop the 0.fdr tags from the rules.
>
> The old C-3 section seemed sane, so I dropped the 0.fdr tagging, cleaned
> up the rules a bit, and included them.

Thanks, looks good. One thing which is open to discussion I think is 
post-release non-numeric versions like 1.0 -> 1.0a where the 'a' doesn't 
*have* to move to release tag from rpm's POV. I don't mind either way, 
perhaps it's best to KISS (like the current draft has) and simply move 
*all* non-numeric bits to release instead of having separate cases for 
pre- and post-releases.

>> 2) While at versions and releases: can we *please* have a standard on
>> release-tags. Current FC trees have a wild variety of things in there
>> like "3jpp_2fc", in general a truly random FC3 vs fc2 dist-tags for some
>> packages (disttags are just fine when needed but can we standardize on
>> lowercase like with package names, please :) .. and so on. Just do
>> 'rpm -qp --qf "%{release}\n" *|sort -u' on current FC-devel RPMS
>> directory for giggles. Please let's have a standard of allowed
>> characters in release and version tags as well since we're having one
>> for names?
>
> Does the current release standard seem sane? Numeric incrementals,
> starting at 1, with the exception case of packages having non-numeric
> versions?
>
> That way, it keeps all the junk out of the Release field, and any
> non-numeric characters that do appear are there for a valid reason.

Yes, it does look sane and the examples are nice and clean. What's missing 
IMHO is statement outside examples that the different parts (where 
necessary) in release tag should be separated with dots, not underscores 
or other creative items and letters should be lowercase wherever possible.

>
>> 3) Addon packages: when a package is renamed, eg 'adodb' -> 'php-adodb'
>> it *might* be a good idea to add the original name as a "Provides:
>> adodb" so people looking for upstream naming can find it more easily.
>
> The "Renaming a Package" section covers this.

Mm, yep, indeed.

On the subject of renaming: shouldn't the Provides and Obsoletes be 
versioned there? There have been some examples in the past where an 
unversioned obsoletes has caused grief (obsolete-loops causing packages 
flip-floping) in the past...

>
>> Oh and FWIW current rawhide contains quite a few packages other than
>> pam_ and SDL_ with underscores in the name (see below). Of these the
>> various apache mod_foo packages are numerous enough to warrant an
>> exception rule of their own, others should perhaps be renamed?
>
> Added Apache httpd to the pam/SDL rule, added a "packages with locales"
> rule, and added an "upstream name uses underscore" rule.

Ok. So far looking nice and clean :)

 	- Panu -