rawhide report: 20050505 changes

[Mike A. Harris]

Naoki wrote:
> Do we like uppercase letters in package names?

Depends on how you define who "we" are.  I personally hate package
names with uppercase in them, wether they're all uppercase, mixed
case, or CamelTextNames.

When we switched to X.Org X11, I managed to cleverly assimilate
the mixed case by naming the packaging xorg-x11, instead of
the hideous looking:  X.Org-X11 or perhaps something worse.  ;o)


> I'm not trolling but I would like to know if there is a documented
> reason for this. It does cause occasional minor annoyances and goes

There is no standard whatsoever.  It's more or less up to
whoever is creating an rpm package to decide how to name it.

In general, most rpm packagers tend to use the upstream
tarball name when possible unless it strays greatly from
common practice.  Others may choose to name it something
that looks aesthetically pleasing to them, or which matches
the end-user visible product naming.

For example, I've seen "Real Player" rpm packages named:

realplayer-x.y-z.i386.rpm

and I've seen:

RealPlayer-x.y-z.i386.rpm

In my personal opinion, and feel free to differ (I'm sure
there are many who do, or everyone would be doing it the
same way already), I find all lowercase packagenames easier
to handle from an administration viewpoint, and for querying
the rpm database for things, etc.

It ultimately is up to whoever is the one making the
packages though, and wether they feel strongly about
it one way or the other, or can be influenced to do
it one way or another.

 > against the de facto standard. Of course it does ensure your packages
 > are at the top of the list ;)

Not really.  It depends on what LC_COLLATE is among other
things.  Some locales seem to sort all capitalized names
first, then all lowercase like ABCabc, while other locales
seem to sort AaBbCc or aAbBcC.

Thankfully we haven't seen rpm packages named things like:

0000-foo-1.0-1.rpm

or

__-==[R34lPl4y3r]==-___-10.1-3.i386.rpm

I'm sure that horrid day will eventually arrive though.  ;o)