package, package2, package3 naming-with-version exploit

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, 2013-04-04 at 21:29 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:

>  From technical perspective, there's zero need to change how 
> multiversion packages work. Its a widely used (at least both in rpm and 
> dpkg worlds) and well-understood mechanism to slap extra qualifiers at 
> the end of the name to achieve that. If you want pretty, human 
> consumable names and versions for things, that is an entirely different 
> issue that could be addressed without breaking the whole world. Comps is 
> one mechanism towards this, other possibilities could be adding separate 
> "pretty name" (and maybe version too) tags to packages and present that 
> to users when it exists. Or something.

This makes complete sense.  One thing I'd add is that given that
"package names" are unpredictable identifiers chosen arbitrarily by a
human at package creation time, we should be making more use of
provides.  So rather than talking about installing "git" the package,
you install /usr/bin/git.  Similarly for build dependencies, software
should require pkgconfig(gio-2.0), not the arbitrary "glib2-devel" name.