Re: guidelines for package names (namespaces?)

[John Kehayias <john.kehayias@protonmail.com>]

Hi Andy,

On Mon, Jul 03, 2023 at 01:55 PM, Andy Tai wrote:

> Hi, in Guix there seems no guidelines for package  names/namespaces
> although there are conventions like Python packages prefixed with
> python-...  (good).  However, this does not cover cases like Gnome
> applications. For example, I submitted the original definition for
> (the GNOME terminal package) terminator, and later I tried to rename
> that gnome-terminator but that was rejected by reviewers.
>

This is a good question and one I wonder about when packaging
sometimes. The general guideline I've seen expressed in Python land at
least (not sure if this is in the manual, but this discussion can go
towards clarifying) is that generally "libraries" get the "python-"
prefix but end user "applications" don't. I believe this is true for
Golang as well, though exceptions abound.

The line is not necessarily clear. As an example, the "autokey"
package is written in Python and I would guess almost always used as
an application as is, but you can script with autokey itself as well.

> Or GNU Guix maintainers may want to consider some type of name space
> support in the package name space because I think name collisions will
> be more and more likely as more packages are submitted for inclusion
> in Guix.

I don't have any insight or knowledge on the internals here but the
general practice of a language prefix for libraries and the like has
so far worked well I think.

John