On Fri, 11 Aug 2023 at 14:49:00 +0000, Stefano Rivera wrote: > > > According to the Debian Python Policy Section 4.3, binary package > > > names should be named after the *import* name of the module, not the > > > PyPI distribution name. > > > Unfortunately, I do not agree at all with this policy. The import name has > > no importance, and IMO, we should change that policy so that the package > > name matches the egg-name rather than the import name. > > I wouldn't quite say it has no importance. It describes which part of > the filesystem the package owns.
More important than that, it describes the interface that the package provides to its reverse-dependencies: changing the name changes the interface, and vice versa. Having the package that lets you "import dbus" systematically be installable as "python3-dbus" is the same design principle as having the C library with SONAME libgtk-4.so.1 installable as libgtk-4-1 (and not gtk4-libs as it would be in some distributions), or having the Perl library that lets you "use File::chdir" installable as libfile-chdir-perl. This has been the policy for a while, and I think it's a good policy. In particular, it forces the necessary conflict resolution to happen at the distro level if two unrelated upstream projects (perhaps pyfoo-1.egg-info and Foo-2.egg-info) are both trying to be our implementation of "import foo". (disclosure: I wrote some of the text in Python Policy describing the naming convention under discussion here, but I was clarifying an existing convention and filling in the details of what to do in corner cases, rather than originating new policy. See also the thread starting at https://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2019/11/msg00125.html.) smcv
