[csw-maintainers] pkgname/catalogname length (was [csw-devel] SF.net SVN: gar:[8215] csw/mgar/gar/v2)

[Roger Håkansson]

On 2010-03-04 18:48, Philip Brown wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 6:27 PM, Roger Håkansson<hson at opencsw.org>  wrote:
>> On 2010-01-29 17:29, Philip Brown wrote:
>>>
>>> It's something like 32, yah. However, that being said, having
>>> super-long package names looks very ugly in system level outputs (eg:
>>> pkginfo), so we discourage it :) the "software name" is supposed to be
>>> the informative one anyway.
>>
>> (Follow-up on a old topic due to the fact that I ran into problem today
>> relating to it)
>> Given that, is there any reason why "software name" also is restricted to 20
>> chars?
>
> same reason. for sanity reasons, we need to have a limit somewhere. so
> both pkgname and software name are limited in the same way.
>

But if pkgname is restricted to 20 chars and software name is "the 
informative one anyway", how informative can you be if you have to cut 
down the upstream name to something that no other dist uses?
I can somewhat agree that having a limit less than 22 for pkgname is 
right (otherwise output from pkginfo looks a bit funky), but then at 
least software name should be able to be longer.

If you are a Solaris-only shop, you might not care what the software 
name is as long as the description is informative about what the package 
does.
But if you're using a mixed environment or used to Linux/BSD and starts 
using Solaris, its gonna be harder to find the right package if its 
called something else than what you're used to (and specially something 
else than upstream calls it...)

For example, mobile-broadband-provider-info would be hard to cut down to 
something that is even close to its original...