[csw-maintainers] Packaging gems and package naming conventions

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi Phil,

Am 18.10.2010 um 18:46 schrieb Philip Brown:
> On 10/18/10, Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski <maciej at opencsw.org> wrote:
>>
>> On the package name length topic, opk recently came across
>> libpyglib-2.0-python.so.0, which yields CSWlibpyglib-2-0-python0, a  
>> 24
>> characters long pkgname.  Current restriction in checkpkg is 20
>> characters for both pkgname and catalogname.  Is it something we
>> intend to keep at all times, or is it OK to exceed this default in
>> cases such as this long soname?a
>
> Reguarding "at all times"... either something is a limit, or it isnt.
> We've gone over this before, multiple times, since the start of CSW.
> There needs to be "a limit", it's insane for it to be unlimited.
> Whatever we pick as a limit, some things are going to hit it, and will
> need to get tweaked.
> It doesnt make sense to go upping the limit every time something  
> hits it.
> 20 chars is the limit for multiple reasons. Some of them include:
> - preserving meaningful display on pkginfo

Nope, pkginfo calculates this dynamically in Solaris 10:
   http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/svr4pkg/pkginfo/pkginfo.c
Solaris 9 works the same, I just checked (and even Solaris 8, btw.)

> - preserving meaningful display on terminal output
> - preserving meaningful display on weekly summaries.

In times of RSS the weekly summary should be no argument against
making the package name longer.

> Remember, our version string is now extra long too, so software name
> and package name need to be kept short to compensate for that.

This doesn't help on packaging e.g. Perl modules. Having
catalogname != CPAN upstream name is a *real* burden, IMHO
much larger than having a couple of long lines.


Best regards

   -- Dago