Packaging talk:Naming

The following metadata was found in MoinMoin that could not be converted to a useful value in MediaWiki:

• : Note that Epoch: has been dropped here, but preserved in Provides/Obsoletes below

Clarification request

" Snapshot packages

If a snapshot package is considered a "pre-release package", you should follow the guidelines listed in Pre-Release Packages , and use an %{alphatag} beginning with the date in YYYYMMDD format and followed by up to 16 (ASCII) alphanumeric characters of your choosing."

Is there a minimum number of alphatag chars ? Would 2 be a good minimum eg: fits hg

Suggest change to: "followed by between 2 and 16 (ASCII) alphanumeric characters of your choosing."

Exception to spec naming still valid?

Does the following still need to be included in this document?

Spec file name As a special exception, there are a few packages which are allowed to have a version in their spec filename. This is because they had the version in their name when they were merged from Fedora Core's cvs and removing the version at that time would have *lost* history: gcc [Please ask the packaging committee to add your package if you think it should also fall under this exception.] This exception will go away when any of the following criteria are met: 1. We move the packages to a revision control system which is able to preserve history across a file rename. 1. The package spec file is going to be renamed anyway (for example, gcc41.spec is currently in cvs. When gcc is upgraded to gcc-4.2, the new spec will be created as gcc.spec not gcc42.spec)

gcc is at gcc-4.6.0-9.fc15 currently, so I assume its spec has been renamed. Regardless, the packaging system is now using git, which I believe does preserve history across file renames, doesn't it? --Ferdnyc 12:55, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, that has indeed been fixed. /me removes the exception. --abadger1999 14:50, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Upgrade path examples are confusing

The two "Upgrade path example" listings (for mozilla and alsa-lib) in the Release Tag section strike me as confusing. In every other list of NVRs given as an example, the text in parentheses that follows each entry is a description of that NVR. For the two upgrade path examples, even though they're formatted in exactly the same way, the text in parentheses effectively describes the NVR on the following line.

I had to read through it twice to catch on to that. On first read I thought I'd just spotted typos in some of the tags, because the entries didn't seem to match "their" descriptions. I don't know if the parenthetical descriptions in these examples should all be shifted downwards by one line, or if the formatting should be changed to make it much more obvious that these two lists are different from all of the others, but either of those changes would enhance clarity a great deal. --Ferdnyc 13:07, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, after 5 months without comment on this, I decided to take a page from Wikipedia and "be bold". So, I undertook a re-working of the descriptions in the two Upgrade Path examples I mentioned. In the process, I ended up eliminating the giant <PRE>s and wikifying the whole works. (All because I wanted to use links in the descriptions! LOL.)

Since I can't edit this page, my proposed replacement for Section 1.5.2.1.2 (currently) of this document can be found at User:Ferdnyc/PackagingEditTest. The full source code of that page should be a drop-in replacement for the Packaging:NamingGuidelines#Pre-Release_packages section; I tried to preserve the structure to make things as easy as possible should anyone wish to adopt my changes.

There shouldn't be any content changes (other than the explanation texts in the two Upgrade Path examples), just lots of formatting tweaks. I'm still not happy about how the table captions look -- I'd prefer they be left-justified rather than centered, I think. Other than that, it seems pretty serviceable to me... but I'm biased. User:Ferdnyc/PackagingEditTest, submitted for your consideration. ;-)

--Ferdnyc 09:09, 23 November 2011 (UTC)