Debian Bug report logs - #10405
NOT A BUG [was: inconsistent docs]

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: "Brian S. Julin" <bri@student.umass.edu>

To: submit@bugs.debian.org

Subject: inconsistent docs

Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 20:02:31 -0400 (EDT)

Package: dpkg-dev
Version: 1.4.0.8

The programmer.html set of documents states that package names
must m/[a-z][0-9]+-\./  Other sources give a different set
of characters including ':'

I suggest : be allowed since I'd like to be able to name perl
packages something somewhat close to their perlish module names e.g.
"dbi::odbc::"

Message #10 received at 10405@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@datasync.com>

To: "Brian S. Julin" <bri@student.umass.edu>

Cc: 10405@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#10405: inconsistent docs

Date: 06 Jun 1997 20:14:34 -0500

Hi,

	What other sources? As far as I can tell, the definitive
 answer is the one implemented by dpkg; and any change would have to
 be considered carefully so as to not break epochs, msdos file names,
 ISO file names, and other packages that parse package versions.

	I would prefer not to have these changes made for merely
 aesthetic reasons.  Call the package perl-dbi-odbc, if that is the
 only reason this change is being requested.

	If there are technical reasons for this change, I stand
 corrected. 

	manoj
-- 
 The trouble with the average family budget is that at the end of the
 money there's too much month left.
Manoj Srivastava               <url:mailto:srivasta@acm.org>
Mobile, Alabama USA            <url:http://www.datasync.com/%7Esrivasta/>

Message #15 received at 10405@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: srivasta@datasync.com

To: bri@calyx.com

Cc: 10405@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: All those Perl CPAN Modules...

Date: 08 Jun 1997 15:15:46 -0500

Hi,

	The definitive standard is the packaging guide, which states:
======================================================================
  4.2.1 Package
          
   The name of the binary package. Package names consist of the
   alphanumerics and + - . (plus, minus and full stop).[13]

   They must be at least two characters and must start with an
   alphanumeric. In current versions of dpkg they are sort of
   case-sensitive[14]; use lowercase package names unless the package
   you're building (or referring to, in other fields) is already using
   uppercase.
======================================================================

	No colons etc allowed. I think that there would have to be
 strong technical reasons to change this at this date, and perl
 packages (I love perl!) are not strong reasons enough. 

	I think this should be enough to close this report, If you
 think that this is incorrect, then please open an discussion on
 debian-devel to change the packaging manual (It definitely would need
 a discussion and be ratified by the developers).

	manoj

-- 
 It is inconceivable that a judicious observer from another solar
 system would see in our species -- which has tended to be cruel,
 destructive, wasteful, and irrational -- the crown and apex of cosmic
 evolution. Viewing us as the culmination of *anything* is grotesque;
 viewing us as a transitional species makes more sense -- and gives us
 more hope. Betty McCollister, "Our Transitional Species", Free
 Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1
Manoj Srivastava               <url:mailto:srivasta@acm.org>
Mobile, Alabama USA            <url:http://www.datasync.com/%7Esrivasta/>

Message #20 received at 10405@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: "Brian S. Julin" <bri@mojo.calyx.net>

To: srivasta@datasync.com

Cc: 10405@bugs.debian.org

Subject: package naming

Date: Sun, 8 Jun 1997 21:58:42 -0400 (EDT)

Yeah, fine, close the report.  Should I open one with the
deb-make maintainer about it's permissiveness, or will
you?  Maybe I'll take it up later on the list when I'm ready
to roll out the CPAN perl archive.  My main concern was
finding a way to deterministically map perlish module names
to debian module names with little or no chance of one module
colliding with the other, but I figured out that I could use the
'+' character instead of the ':'.  That would make Foo_Bar::Fnord::
into foo-bar++fnord++, which IMHO is ugly as sin.  If dpkg can
already handle the ':'s I'd prefer to use them but as you say
discussion of that would be needed.  Fortunately now
that I look at the CPAN module list most of them don't
even have underscores in their names.

I have managed to get the MakeMaker based .deb builder to call
deb-make when appropriate.  I have not yet integrated that
make target code you sent; that comes next.  After I add 
that and work on the /usr/doc/modulename stuff I may actually be 
able to churn out a first wave of the simplest modules, 
but none that require other modules until I get automatic
dependency stuff worked out.  I'll mail an announcement when 
the code reaches some level of usefulness.

--
Brian S. Julin

Message #25 received at 10405@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>

To: bri@calyx.com

Cc: 10405@bugs.debian.org, srivasta@datasync.com

Subject: Re: Bug#10405: package naming

Date: 08 Jun 1997 23:00:11 -0500

"Brian S. Julin" <bri@mojo.calyx.net> writes:

> If dpkg can already handle the ':'s

Possible, but I would seriously doubt it.  Colons are currently used
to separate out epoch numbers in package versions.

-- 
Rob

Message #30 received at 10405@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de>

To: Debian Development <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>

Cc: srivasta@datasync.com, 10405@bugs.debian.org, bri@calyx.com

Subject: Perl Police (was Re: Bug#10405: package naming)

Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 11:00:47 +0200 (CEST)

[I'm pulling this thread over to debian-devel since I think this might be
intresting for more people.]

On Sun, 8 Jun 1997, Brian S. Julin wrote:

> Yeah, fine, close the report.  Should I open one with the
> deb-make maintainer about it's permissiveness, or will
> you?  Maybe I'll take it up later on the list when I'm ready
> to roll out the CPAN perl archive.  My main concern was
> finding a way to deterministically map perlish module names
> to debian module names with little or no chance of one module
> colliding with the other, but I figured out that I could use the
> '+' character instead of the ':'.  That would make Foo_Bar::Fnord::
> into foo-bar++fnord++, which IMHO is ugly as sin.  If dpkg can
> already handle the ':'s I'd prefer to use them but as you say
> discussion of that would be needed.  Fortunately now
> that I look at the CPAN module list most of them don't
> even have underscores in their names.

Hi!

I'm the "Debian Policy Manager" and one topic of my "TODO list" is to
write some section about our "Perl Policy". That is, I want to have more
stuff of CPAN packaged up in Debian and I think we need a policy about
naming conventions (that's what this bug report is about) and how many
perl modules go into one .deb (for example, "libnet-perl" includes
several perl modules now). 

In "hamm", we currently have the following perl module packages:

	libdbd-mysql-perl_1.63.1-1.deb
	libdbi-perl_0.79-1.deb
	libnet-perl_1.0502-1.deb
	libwww-perl_5.07-1.deb

Note, that the first one is called "DBD::MySQL". Thus, if you have
"aaa::bbb:ccc", the package named would be

	libaaa-bbb-ccc-perl_23456-1.deb

if you follow this "implicit convention.

I think this naming scheme is quite reasonable. What does everyone else
think about it?

(I'm definitely against having more special characters in file names, as
`+' or `:'.)

> I have managed to get the MakeMaker based .deb builder to call
> deb-make when appropriate.  I have not yet integrated that
> make target code you sent; that comes next.  After I add 
> that and work on the /usr/doc/modulename stuff I may actually be 
> able to churn out a first wave of the simplest modules, 
> but none that require other modules until I get automatic
> dependency stuff worked out.  I'll mail an announcement when 
> the code reaches some level of usefulness.

This sounds as you've set up a "default procedure" of how to pack CPAN's
module into .deb's. Great! I always thought of something like that but I
never had time to do so.

Since CPAN's modules all apply to a certain "standard" (i.e. all makefiles
have the same structure) such a default procedure is definitely a good
thing. (Perhaps we could add this functionality to deb-make. If it
discovers a CPAN module it could set up everything for the maintainer
automatically and he/she would just have to fill in the description, etc.)


Perhaps we should "reassign" this bug to the "debian-policy" package
instead of closing it, so that we don't loose all the mails.


Any comments?


Cheers,

Chris

--                 Christian Schwarz
                    schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
Don't know Perl?     schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
      
Visit                  PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7  34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
http://www.perl.com     http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/

Message #35 received at 10405@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: "Brian S. Julin" <bri@mojo.calyx.net>

To: Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de>

Cc: Debian Development <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>, srivasta@datasync.com, 10405@bugs.debian.org, CPAN-Debian interested list <jgoerzen@complete.org>, jim@jimpick.com, tko@westgac3.dragon.com

Subject: Re: Perl Police (was Re: Bug#10405: package naming)

Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 18:59:37 -0400 (EDT)

On Mon, 9 Jun 1997, Christian Schwarz wrote:
> I think this naming scheme is quite reasonable. What does everyone else
> think about it?

What do you do if you do have a package turn up with an underscore
in its name? 

> (I'm definitely against having more special characters in file names, as
> `+' or `:'.)

Personally I think it would be best to change the module name as
little as possible.  '+' and ':' were at some point legal for package 
names, according to deb-make's error messages and behavior.  Perhaps
we should just ask a dpkg pro?

> This sounds as you've set up a "default procedure" of how to pack CPAN's
> module into .deb's. Great! I always thought of something like that but I
> never had time to do so.

Yes, I'm working on it at least.  My next step is to add pod2html calls 
so the Debian policy on using HTML when possible is satisfied.  I am
doing this with an architecture subclass MM module for ExtUtils::MakeMaker
and a few very minor changes to MakeMaker.pm itself.  You can examine
the work-in-progress at http://calyx.com/~bri/projects/Debian/

One of the goals here is for the packages to smartly determine 
which other perl packages they depend upon by examining the
'use' and 'require' statements and such.  This is already partly
done by MakeMaker, in fact there is an ALPHA test extension that
goes to the CPAN ftp archive to retrieve files you are lacking 
automatically.  All I need to to is harness the results of the 
functions they are using for debian's purposes.

However I will end up with a major headache if I cannot reliably 
map perl module names to debian package names.  I'd prefer it to
be pretty, but definitely need it to be functional.  It's bad enough
that the case-folding runs me the risk of collisions between module 
names.

> Since CPAN's modules all apply to a certain "standard" (i.e. all makefiles
> have the same structure) such a default procedure is definitely a good
> thing. (Perhaps we could add this functionality to deb-make. If it
> discovers a CPAN module it could set up everything for the maintainer
> automatically and he/she would just have to fill in the description, etc.)

Yes, I was thinking that my MM_Debian_Linux.pm file could be distributed
in the deb-make package.

Answer me a question -- I see a lot of newer debian packages using
"./debian/stamp-build" as the stamp target yet deb-make and 
dpkg-buildpackage seem to like to touch and clean "./build", which I 
suppose is obsolete behavior.  I note though that the "hello" package 
still uses it.  Is there a  good example of a modern debian/rules 
file available?  I'd be willing to mail the maintainer of deb-make
a patch to modernize it.

Thanx

--
Brian S. Julin

Message #40 received at 10405@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de>

To: bri@calyx.com

Cc: Debian Development <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>, 10405@bugs.debian.org, CPAN-Debian interested list <jgoerzen@complete.org>

Subject: Re: Perl Police (was Re: Bug#10405: package naming)

Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 22:51:02 +0200 (CEST)

On Mon, 9 Jun 1997, Brian S. Julin wrote:

> On Mon, 9 Jun 1997, Christian Schwarz wrote:
> > I think this naming scheme is quite reasonable. What does everyone else
> > think about it?
> 
> What do you do if you do have a package turn up with an underscore
> in its name? 

We could easily replace it with a dash (-).

> > (I'm definitely against having more special characters in file names, as
> > `+' or `:'.)
> 
> Personally I think it would be best to change the module name as
> little as possible.  '+' and ':' were at some point legal for package 
> names, according to deb-make's error messages and behavior.  Perhaps
> we should just ask a dpkg pro?

I would not like to have these special characters in file names. Let us
try to stick to the current "set of legal characters".

> > This sounds as you've set up a "default procedure" of how to pack CPAN's
> > module into .deb's. Great! I always thought of something like that but I
> > never had time to do so.
> 
> Yes, I'm working on it at least.  My next step is to add pod2html calls 
> so the Debian policy on using HTML when possible is satisfied.  I am
> doing this with an architecture subclass MM module for ExtUtils::MakeMaker
> and a few very minor changes to MakeMaker.pm itself.  You can examine
> the work-in-progress at http://calyx.com/~bri/projects/Debian/

I did not yet have time to look at your page. However, this sounds great!
IMHO, we should try to get all stuff of CPAN into debs--and this should be
highly automized. And of course, every package should provide HTML docs.

> One of the goals here is for the packages to smartly determine 
> which other perl packages they depend upon by examining the
> 'use' and 'require' statements and such.  This is already partly
> done by MakeMaker, in fact there is an ALPHA test extension that
> goes to the CPAN ftp archive to retrieve files you are lacking 
> automatically.  All I need to to is harness the results of the 
> functions they are using for debian's purposes.
> 
> However I will end up with a major headache if I cannot reliably 
> map perl module names to debian package names.  I'd prefer it to
> be pretty, but definitely need it to be functional.  It's bad enough
> that the case-folding runs me the risk of collisions between module 
> names.

What is your problem exactly? We could easily change our standard to
"cpan-xxx.deb", for example.

> > Since CPAN's modules all apply to a certain "standard" (i.e. all makefiles
> > have the same structure) such a default procedure is definitely a good
> > thing. (Perhaps we could add this functionality to deb-make. If it
> > discovers a CPAN module it could set up everything for the maintainer
> > automatically and he/she would just have to fill in the description, etc.)
> 
> Yes, I was thinking that my MM_Debian_Linux.pm file could be distributed
> in the deb-make package.
> 
> Answer me a question -- I see a lot of newer debian packages using
> "./debian/stamp-build" as the stamp target yet deb-make and 
> dpkg-buildpackage seem to like to touch and clean "./build", which I 
> suppose is obsolete behavior.  I note though that the "hello" package 
> still uses it.  Is there a  good example of a modern debian/rules 
> file available?  I'd be willing to mail the maintainer of deb-make
> a patch to modernize it.

I don't know of such a change. However, the "hello" package is still the
one that should be used as reference if you are in doubt. Note, that the
"deb-make" package is still a bit "unofficial", though it is really
useful!



Cheers,

Chris

--                 Christian Schwarz
Do you know         schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
Debian GNU/Linux?    schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
      
Visit                  PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7  34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
http://www.debian.org   http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/

Message #45 received at 10405@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: "Brian S. Julin" <bri@mojo.calyx.net>

To: srivasta@datasync.com

Cc: bri@calyx.com, 10405@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: All those Perl CPAN Modules...

Date: Sun, 22 Jun 1997 17:11:48 -0400 (EDT)

Just a quick question:

What was your intent in setting the LINKEXT=>'' in that 
makefile code you sent?  (This seems to prevent XS modules
from compiling.)

--
Brian S. Julin

Message #50 received at 10405@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Adam Di Carlo <apharris@burrito.onshore.com>

To: control@bugs.debian.org

Cc: 10405@bugs.debian.org

Subject: dpkg-dev bugs [cont'd -- messed up last time w/ thanks]

Date: Sat, 07 Nov 1998 15:12:56 -0500

retitle 4525 NOT A BUG [was: dpkg-buildpackage assumes file protections and shoots self in foot]
retitle 4628 dpkg-source feature request: deal with binary files
severity 4628 wishlist
retitle 7714 CLOSABLE [was: dpkg-source should possibly not use unified diff format]
retitle 10405 NOT A BUG [was: inconsistent docs]
severity 13961 wishlist
thanks

Bug 4525 is not a bug, so have said Ian and Guy (read the bug log).

Bug 7714 is not a bug, nor would anyone really recommend going from
unified diff format to '-C 2'.

Bug 10405 is not a bug, not a good idea, and a policy issue rather
than a dpkg-dev issue.  It asks for pkgs to be able to have ':' in the
names of them, a thoroughly bad idea.

Bug 13961 is a request for source-dependancies; definately an
important wishlist, but a wishlist, not a bug.

.....A. P. Harris...apharris@onShore.com...<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>

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