[I CC: this to the mailing list since I think this is of public intrest.
Hope you don't mind]
On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, Brian S. Julin wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, Christian Schwarz wrote:
> > What is your problem exactly? We could easily change our standard to
> > "cpan-xxx.deb", for example.
>
> The problem is that perl module names take the form of
> ([A-Za-z0-9_]+::)+. That is, they can have both "_" and
> "::" in their names in addition to lower and uppercase
> alphanumerics. If there was one module named Foo__Bar::
> and another module named Foo::Bar:: then both would be
> translated to perl-foo-bar- or perl-foo--bar-- depending on how you
> did it. Now there don't appear to be any modules that
> clash in this way, but that could change. In addition since
> dpkg in not case sensitive, the module Foo:: would have the same
> package name as the module FOO::. Fortunately, there are
> conventions for module naming in perl that make such a clash
> unlikely to happen. What I possibly could do because the
> underscore character appears to be rarely used is
> s/_/--/ and s/::/-/. That way Foo__Bar:: becomes perl-foo--bar-
> and more common module names like Foo::Bar become perl-foo-bar-.
> Since there cannot be a "::::" in a module name I guess this
> would work. But having a trailing "::" would instantly clue perl
> users in that it was a perl package. I'll work without
> the ":" though since it seems to be such a big deal.
>
> We could override some module names but then there would have to be
> a registry of overrided module names kept somewhere, or else
> when the MakeMaker utility was trying to figure out what debian-CPAN
> packages depended on which others it would make mistakes, since it
> would be working from the module names.
I just had a look at an (old) index file of CPAN. The ".tar.gz" of the
modules have better names for us, for example: "Date-GetDate-2.00.tar.gz".
This could easily be converted to "lib-date-getdate-perl_2.00.deb".
> Another topic brought up by the maintainer of dpkg-ftp was
> that it would probably be best not to occlude the primary
> debian distribution with several hundred perl modules, but run
> a side-distribution instead. He says he has added this feature
> to dpkg-ftp.
I agree that having each module in a single .deb is probably to much.
However, I think these modules are of general intrest. Such, we could
probably pack them up into a few larger .debs. (We have chosen the same
way for our new TeX packages before: we had lots of small packages before
but I think everyone is happy with the few larger .debs we have now.)
Isn't CPAN split into "sections" (categories)? What about if we pack up
all modules in a section into a .deb. This would get us (referring to my
old index file):
lib-perl-core
lib-perl-development
lib-perl-os
lib-perl-networking
lib-perl-types
lib-perl-database
lib-perl-ui
lib-perl-languages
lib-perl-files
lib-perl-strings
lib-perl-options
lib-perl-auth
lib-perl-www
...
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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