Hi! Some days ago Niels Thykier pointed out that the handling of origin files and vendor modules was not consistent. When looking into this for the Dpkg::Vendor::<vendor> loading code, I realized it was not properly handling vendor names with problematic special characters such as [\s:;/], and that it was not capitalizing it to conform to the existing perl module naming convention. The origin file handling was also only mapping the _first_ space into a «-».
So I've added code to remap anything that is not alphanumeric into «-» for origin files, and to use them as word separators for module names and capitalization points. And then added deprecation warnings for the origin filenames and vendor modules that contain non-alphanumeric characters, and for vendor modules also for names starting with lower-case letters. I've updated the documentation to make these clear in git HEAD. I've gone through the derivatives census, and it's not clear from there what derivatives have a Dpkg::Vendor module, but the change seemed safe given the currently listed vendor names. And in any case there's going to be a transition period. If this is going to cause some issues, please let me know and we can talk about possible solutions/alternatives or something. Even though the easy way out would be to provide both module names. But there are still some vague handling as there are multiple casing tries for file and module lookups (lower-cased, as-is, lower-cased then capitalized, capitalized), which can make this overly confusing. I'm pondering whether to restrict these names further to have extremely clear rules, although I'm afraid of this potentially causing issues? A simple rule would be that a vendor name can only contain alphanumeric characters in any casing, and dashes. No spaces or other special characters allowed, as that can also be problematic on say debian/rules when using $(filter ...). For origin filenames these would be mapped to lowercase, for the perl module name dashes would mark capitalization boundaries and then removed, so we'd have: Vendor origin-filename vendor-module ------ --------------- ------------- Some-Vendor-OS some-vendor-os SomeVendorOs SOME-vendor-os some-vendor-os SomeVendorOs SomeVendorOS somevendoros Somevendoros My worry with the above proposal of further tightening the rules, is that this might affect code expecting specific vendor names, so it might not be feasible or desirable even with a transition period. A more lenient but still safe rule could be to allow other non-alphanumeric characters (say such as [-.:;/%]) as separators except for spaces, which would follow the same rule as the aforementioned «-» one. Otherwise the casing rules could still apply to both the origin-filename and the vendor-module, as that would imply just those two files, and no further interface fallout. Let me know what you think! Thanks, Guillem
