On Wed, 28 May 2003, Deedra Waters wrote:
Hello debian-policy, I am not a subscriber, but I have some questions for
you. Please CC me if you care to reply and want me to read it. I am the
maintainer and main author of libcurl and I feel bad about this issue.
> Debian has rules and policies for the way that packages are done. There's
> the normal debian-policy, and the debian policy for perl. This package is
> named according to those guidelines. I don't really have control over that.
This quote from Deedra Waters is regarding my complaints on the package name
in the subject of this mail: "libwww-curl-perl".
This package is named using a prefix with a library that has nothing to do
with this package ("libwww"). If I go to www.debian.org/distrib/packages and
search for all the 'libwww' packages there are, I get to see 6 different ones
in stable (and 8 in unstable[1]).
*ALL* but one of those packages are for various libwww-related things. They
provide the libwww library, development stuff for libwww or APIs etc for
libwww.
ONE of the packages (only present in unstable) has NOTHING to do with libwww,
and it is named libwww-curl-perl. Why?
The perl binding package for libwww is named 'libwww-perl'. Now, libcurl has
many similarities to what libwww offers. So why isn't the perl package for
libcurl named in the same fashion? It would make the package named
'libcurl-perl' and nothing else.
This current way of naming the package is confusing users, is denies libcurl
users to find it using the more sensible search for 'libcurl'[2] (the former
name of this package was "libcurl-easy-perl" which made a lot more sense) and
it implies to users that the binding somehow depends, uses or relies on
libwww, which it doesn't.
If this naming is made following the naming guidelines (which I admittedly
haven't read), then I suggest that the guidelines are modified. If this
package name is not forced to be like this by any guideline, then I suggest
that the package name is changed to reflect its true identity.
Thanks for reading, I'll go back to my cave now.
[1] =
http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=libwww&searchon=names&subword=1&version=unstable&release=all
[2] =
http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=libcurl&searchon=names&subword=1&version=unstable&release=all
--
Daniel Stenberg -- curl: been grokking URLs since 1998
