Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Apologies if I missed a previous discussion on this topic, but… I’m
> skeptical about the renames.  I assume that the original names were
> those commonly used in distributions, which in itself may be a good
> reason to keep them.

Names may vary a lot across distributions.  Especially when it comes to
games, since they tend to have more exotic titles.

If the majority of distributions decides on a poor name, we don't have
to repeat the same mistake ;)

> Those names are also used upstream in some cases: the tarball for
> wesnoth is called “westnoth*.tar.gz”, for example, and the GitHub
> project of L’Abbaye des morts is “abbayedesmorts” (no ‘l’).  Like our
> naming guidelines say (info "(guix) Package Naming"), we should try to
> stick to the upstream name.
>
> Thoughts?

I think it's important to ask "why should we name a package this way."
What's the rationale behind a package name?

We are facing the users, not package maintainers.  Users are not
supposed to know about:

- domain names
- tarball names
- github names

Those are details, in my understanding, reserved to developers and
packagers.
More often than not, those shortened names are used because of technical
limitations (e.g. character length).  We don't have to forward those
limitations on ourselves.

I think it makes sense that we expose to the users names that speaks to
them, i.e. the "official project full name".

Finally, as I mentioned above with the completion systems that we have,
we've got nothing to lose in having long names.

My two cents :)

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/