[users] Circular obsoletes between Dries and FE6 rrdtool Perl bindings

[Dag Wieers]

On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Rex Dieter wrote:

> Dag Wieers wrote:
> 
> > If you think you can pour some sense into the Fedora packagers, feel free to
> > try. Also ask them why they use mixed case for the following new packages
> > (against their own packaging guidelines). Introducing new incompatibilities
> > all the time.
> 
> In most of these cases, the mixed case names were those chosen by upstream.
> Packaging simply followed suit.

I understand that, I wasn't implying the casing was made up :)

But I'm pretty sure the original packaging guidelines that spot created 
demanded lower case, but allowed exceptions. (eg. perl, SDL and maybe 
a few other) Even when upstream did it differently. I see now that the 
current guidelines seems to insist on upstream.

For some packages the common sense is to allow uppercase (eg. BasiliskII 
or R), but in almost all other cases lowercase should be mandatory.


> Now, creating a new (sane) packaging policy that mandates lower case package
> names would make a lot of sense.

Could we revert those 'new' packages in FE that already existed in 
RPMforge to lowercase ? I can make a list of those. Some of the packages 
(like django) I would like to introduce as well in lowercase if possible.

One of the reasons to do it in lowercase is that almost all programs sort 
packages by name. Even ls can cause confusion to what is available. If 99% 
of the packages start with lowercase there is no need to confuse people 
for that 1% that 'gets lost' because it starts with an uppercase.

Another case for incompatibility is the perl-something and something-perl 
convention. I don't see a good reason to use the something-perl 
convention, even though Red Hat insist on doing it this way since the 
beginning of time. Same argumentation as above.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]