Re: [gentoo-dev] Uppercase characters in package names

[Michał Górny]

On Fri, 2 Dec 2016 13:38:19 -0600
William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 07:47:01PM +0100, Michał Górny wrote:
> > On Fri, 2 Dec 2016 13:02:48 -0500
> > Mike Gilbert <floppym@g.o> wrote:
> >
> > > The devmanual states:
> > >
> > > The name section should contain only lowercase non-accented letters,
> > > the digits 0-9, hyphens, underscores and plus characters. Uppercase
> > > characters are strongly discouraged, but technically valid.
> > >
> > > https://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/file-format/index.html
> > >
> > >
> > > Why are uppercase characters strongly discouraged?
> > >
> > > Wouldn't it make sense to follow upstream's naming convention?
> >
> > I'd say keeping things lowercase makes sense for end user packages. For
> > pure dependencies with consistent conventions (e.g. perl), it makes
> > sense to keep upstream's naming.
>
> I'm not advocating renaming this, but I found an example of this when
> looking to package something:
>
> dev-python/configargparse is called ConfigArgParse upstream.
> If we had named it dev-python/ConfigArgParse, we wouldn't need to set
> MY_PN, MY_P or S in our ebuild, and I wouldn't have had to check the
> package to see if it was the same as the package I need to depend on.

I should also add a statistical point that I've already seen 2 or 3
times Gentoo developers committing duplicate packages (i.e. missing
a package already there, under a different name/category).

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>