[csw-maintainers] pkgname limit 20 chars?

[Sebastian Kayser]

Philip Brown wrote:
> On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 03:43:10PM +0200, Sebastian Kayser wrote:
>> Are we restricted by external limitations here?
> 
> have to draw the line somewhere. we've drawn the line at 20 chars for
> [mumble] years. it's a reasonable place to draw it, and it doesnt matter
> much what the CSWxxxx package name is to users, so not having it exactly
> match the software name, really isnt important.

Ok, just so that i get it right (please correct me if am wrong):

1) The software name is the one users should work with and we can/should
keep it in a consistent, readable, and "no-surprise" way. This means i
can keep pm_datetimetimezone as software name for the DateTime::TimeZone
perl module.

Shortening of software names like it was done for some Class::xxx
packages (pm_clsxxx versus pm_classxxx) should be avoided.

2) The package name is limited (by us) to 20 chars, so that we need to
come up with a way to condense package names > 20 chars.

   pm_datetimetimezone 	-> CSWpmdatetimetz
   pm_xmlatomsimplefeed -> CSWpmxmlatomsimplefd


Question: Is this self-imposed 20 char limitation worth have
discrepancies between software and package names? Does it gain us
something? Although i install packages via pkg-get or pkgutil and by
their software names, i often find myself dealing with packages by their
package names afterwards (pkginfo, pkgrm, /var/sadm/pkg/...). IMHO just
a source of possible confusion.

Sebastian