[Fedora-packaging] Inconsistencies in Python package naming

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 28 Mar 2013 07:47:37 -0400 (EDT), Bohuslav Kabrda wrote:

> > > Problem 3:
> > > The table in [2] is even more confusing. If the upstream name is
> > > "pygtk", why should Fedora's package be called "pygtk2"? Where did
> > > the "2" come from?
> > > 
> > 
> > The naming is derived from the GTK+ framework base packages: gtk+
> > (v1.x),
> > gtk2 (v2.x), gtk3 (v3.x).
> > 
> 
> So why isn't the python 3 package named python3-pygtk2, but just python3-pygtk?
> 

Cannot find the package in Rawhide or F19, so I cannot examine its
contents. It could be that it can use either GTK with introspection or
includes pygtkcompat or whatever.

> The fact that you have to workaround these by guessing the package names
> or doing searches prior to installation proves that something is
> wrong/inconsistent. 

Deviating from upstream release names bears risks, too.

Given your example of "pygtk", currently one would need to find out that
it's called "pygtk2", and in the future one could not install it as
"pygtk" because it would be renamed to "python-pygtk" just for
consistency.

> If you look at naming guidelines for other languages that prepend
> something Fedora-specific before the actual package name (Ruby, Perl,
> PHP, ...), you'll see that all of them have completely clear naming scheme.

Can't verify that easily. There are packages "foo-php", and there even
is a package "foo-php-devel" (and due to that it gets multilib'ed).

> Also, try to look at some other distro naming rules for Python - e.g. Mageia [1], OpenSuse [2], Debian [3] all name python extension modules python-foo, resp. python3-foo.
> 

Some other dists also apply different naming schemes for shared library
packages. Even others dists create different sets of subpackages.

Wait for somebody else's comments. ;)  I'm not opposed to changing the
guidelines, I just think it would not matter much, and I don't yet see
that it would resolve all confusion (such as the python-foo vs. foo-python
naming cases). IMO, we better improve %summary and %description, so
searching for packages will become much more usable.

-- 
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