[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Re: gnustep in debian

[Hubert Chan]

[Moved to GNUstep maintainers list for discussion on package naming.]

On 2006-01-04 13:18:29 -0700 Christoph Berg <myon at debian.org> wrote:

>>>> - gnustep-netclasses:
>>>>      Only depended on by talksoup.app.  Gürkan, do you want to take this, 
>>>>  since you're maintaining talksoup.app?  This package should also be 
>>>> renamed to netclasses.framework.
> 
> I don't maintain any gnustep packages and I don't intend to do so, but
> here's my personal view on package naming: all gnustep packages should
> be named gnustep-*, or maybe lib*-gnustep for libraries. The currently
> used namespace *.app is also fine, but please don't extend it by
> *.tool, *.framework etc. which will somehow lead to the impression
> that gnustep uses *.* as its namespace.
> 
> It's fine for me if you decide to go with
> postgres95eoadaptor.framework et al., but please keep in mind that
> most people outside the gnustep world find these *.{app,framework,...}
> package names pretty strange.
> 
> Personally, I would name new packages gnustep-* and leave the current
> package names as they are (maybe switch on the next soname bump).
> 
> (I've Cc'ed Joerg Jaspert since he has rejected some packages recently
> partly also due to naming concerns.)

(This is my understanding of the situation.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong about something.)  We currently have, in the archive, packages named *.app, *.framework, and *.bundle.  These packages are generally named after their filenames.  In GNUstep (and OpenStep), most things are packaged under a directory, which is ofter referred to as a "bundle" that contains all the code and data necessary for the package.  Application bundles are named *.app, framework bundles are named *.framework, and general extensions (such as WildMenus, which changes the look-and-feel of programs) are named *.bundle, which is where we got the Debian package names from.  (There are other types of bundles as well, like *.prefs bundles, that add preferences panels to the Preferences.app application, but these are less common.)

I don't think we need our own namespace as such.  GNOME and KDE don't have their own namespaces.  They just follow the names of their upstream packages, and follow the standard Debian naming conventions for libraries