[MTOS-dev] Debian package naming

[Finn Smith]

On Dec 13, 2007 2:29 PM, Byrne Reese <byrne at sixapart.com> wrote:
> I sent this prior to hearing Tim's movabletype-core suggestion. I must
> admit, it does have a nice ring to it. But it does not help communicate
> and disambiguate the license.

As noted by someone else, this seems irrelevant to me. If it's in
Debian, it's open souce. The people who know and care about these kind
of licenses know this. It seems more important to fit into the naming
and conventions of Debian than to "communicate and disambiguate the
license".


On Dec 13, 2007 4:03 PM, Jeremy Fluhmann <fluhmann at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've also seen several 'packagename-common' packages, if looking for Yet
> Another Package Name Suggestion.

It's true that <package>-common is the convention for large pieces of
software that require some common files. An example of this would be
mysql: mysql-common is a package which is a dependency of both
mysql-client and mysql-server. It doesn't really seem to apply in this
case since there isn't a core set of conf files with different
executables that depend on them that you would want to install
separately.

Perusing the Debian repositories, *-core is quite rare. I see
git-core, gnome-core, kde-core, ocaml-core, and not much else. Rather,
the basename is usually assumed to be the core and other packages are
usually named <basename>-<addon/variant>. For example the packages
firefox and firefox-dom-inspector.

My vote would be to keep it simple and go with "movabletype" or
"movable-type" for the package name. If necessary, descriptive
qualifiers for any notional future packages can be appended as
necessary. eg movabletype would be in the Debian repository and Six
Apart could release movabletype-enterprise package if it saw fit.

Admittedly, I am probably biased by the fact that I built a Debian
package for 3.x named "movable-type". (More on that forthcoming under
separate copy.)

Here's a list of the Debian web packages for reference:
http://packages.debian.org/stable/web/

-F