Package naming guidelines

From GoboLinux Knowledge Base

Shell scripting coding style

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The package naming guidelines are:

1. The app authors are sovereign about the capitalization, if they define it. Examples are: XFree86, LyX, Qt.
2. If the capitalization is undefined (ie, all-lowercase) or inconsistent (for example, showing up in different forms in the README), our set of capitalization rules apply.
3. Applications are always sovereign in defining their usage of hyphens and underscores to separate words in their names.
4. Packages should never have spaces in their names. If they do, the space is simply suppressed (according to this, the name Acrobat_Reader is indeed incorrect).
5. There should never be two package names differing only in capitalization. They should be considered to be two versions of the same app (future versions of the Scripts may actually assume this).

Our set of rules is defined in the NamingConventions script. I won't list them exhaustively here because that would be like re-implementing the script, only this time in literate programming. In short, it deals with detecting common prefix and suffix patterns, such as "Tools" and "Utils" and vowel-consonant heuristics.

It is worth noting that the CompileProgram script scans the app's README file in order to search for occurence of (consistent) capitalization. This is effective for a large number of packages (one example is GtkGLArea, if my memory serves me well).