[csw-maintainers] Packaging gems and package naming conventions

[Philip Brown]

On 10/21/10, Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski <maciej at opencsw.org> wrote:
>
> Yes, I think it's a good thing to distinguish between presentation and
> data itself.  Fitting information on a 80-column terminal is a
> separate issue from having the information in the first place.  You
> can come up with a number of algorithms to fit that information on the
> screen.  I believe that having a consistent mapping between sonames
> and package names is more valuable than the absence of a text
> formatting step.
>

Lets do a brief cost/benefit analysis here:

Direct mapping of full soname -> package name, with no truncation
+  "benefits" maintainers. Although really only a small subset of
maintainers, working
  on a small subset of packages
- negatively impacts users, via readability issues

Keeping existing limits on lengths:
+  benefits all users by keeping outputs consistently and easily readable.
- means maintainers might have to occasionally do a little extra
searching... ONE TIME,
   until then they put in the dependency lines, and then they'll know
where to go from then on.