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

[Philip Brown]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Roger Håkansson <hson at opencsw.org> wrote:
>
> 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?

"informative" is used loosely :)
there are very few software packages that have names even long than 10 chars.
all the important ones are under 10, in fact.
mozilla
firefox
bind
gnome

and so on and so forth.

The long package names, tend to be components of larger things.
To use the nasty examples of sun package names:
 SUNWgnome-img-editor-devel-share

I would suggest that they arent really that important. They're not
suposed to be out-and-out 50 char descriptions. that's what the DESC
field is for, after all :)


A reminder why they're short:

So displays of things like
"show software name, pkg name, and revision"
fit nicely in a text window.

Given that our revision fields can get disgustingly long these days,
we need to be relatively conservative about the other fields.

Also,  having software name get ludicrously long, becomes redundant to
the description field eventually.

> 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...


I think that sounds like this is a perfect example of what I'm talking
about. That sounds like it belongs as part of a more comprehensive set
of packages. Wouldnt most people just be interested in installing
"mobile-support", or "mobile-info" or whatever, rather than
individually hunting down  "mobile-broadband-provider-info"  ?
The sub-package names are not that important.

Particularly when you can have

pkg-get -D mobile

easily pull up
mobile_Whatever - mobile broadband provider info xml tables and info