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Revision as of 18:12, 27 February 2009 by Laubersm (talk | contribs) (PackagingDrafts/ASCIINamingLowercase moved to Archive:PackagingDrafts/ASCIINamingLowercase: wiki cleanup)
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Package names should be in all lowercase.

Reasoning

  • This keeps people from guessing whether a package is called geoip, GeoIP, Geoip, or GeoIp.
  • Many tools only do basic byte-value sorting. Mixed case results in human-hostile sorting.
  • Historic free casing resulted in inconsistent choices for the same projects depending on the packager sensitivities. The only simple rule to ensure user-friendly consistency is not to allow special casing.
  • Prevents package names which only differ in case.
  • This is safer WRT case-insensitive storage and mirror nodes.
  • This transform is much kinder than what is asked of non-ASCII project.
  • Even historic mixed-case packages like X have been converted to lowercase over time. There is no good reason to allow packagers to repeat the mixed-case mistake now.
  • Note: Debian does this already but doesn't have rationale for the restriction.

Change

Specifically, all Fedora packages must be named using only the following characters of the Unicode Basic Latin block , using the UTF-8 encoding.

The packager may add a virtual provides in the package that references the upstream name if they think it will help people find it.

2>0 2> 2> 2> 0 2> 2> 2> p
0030 0070
2>1 2> 2> 2> 1 2> 2> a q
0031 0061 0071
2>2 2> 2> 2> 2 2> 2> b r
0032 0062 0072
2>3 2> 2> 2> 3 2> 2> c s
0033 0063 0073
2>4 2> 2> 2> 4 2> 2> d t
0034 0064 0074
2>5 2> 2> 2> 5 2> 2> e u
0035 0065 0075
2>6 2> 2> 2> 6 2> 2> f v
0036 0066 0076
2>7 2> 2> 2> 7 2> 2> g w
0037 0067 0077
2>8 2> 2> 2> 8 2> 2> h x
0038 0068 0078
2>9 2> 2> 2> 9 2> 2> i y
0039 0069 0079
2>A 2> 2> 2> 2> 2> 2> j z
006A 007A
2>B 2> 2> + 2> 2> 2> k 2>
002B 006B
2>C 2> 2> 2> 2> 2> 2> l 2>
006C
2>D 2> 2> - 2> 2> 2> m 2>
002D 006D
2>E 2> 2> . 2> 2> 2> n 2>
002E 006E
2>F 2> 2> 2> 2> 2> _ o 2>
005F 006F
Discouraged
Allowed