I was reading up about gentoo's portage system, i think we can learn a thing or two from them.
"In addition Portage supports the concept of SLOTs. In the development of Gentoo Linux its developers often found that we needed to have multiple versions of certain packages (such as libraries) installed to satisfy the demands of other packages. The traditional approach to solving this problem has been to treat different versions of the same package as different packages with slightly different names." Ref http://www.gentoo.org/doc/portage-manual.html I think they raise a valid point, we do mangle our package names to make them unique. Example: not picking on nano, its just the first one i ran across. Package: nano Package: nano-tiny Package: nano-tiny-utf8 The upstream name is nano, we create the debian extensions -tiny and -tiny-utf8 to make the name unique so our packaging system can handle different build configurations. It would be more idealistic if we seperate the upstream name and the debian extension into seperate fields to keep it clear. Im not sure about the best way to do it, it could be done by introducing two new fields, and preserving the Package: field for use as the combination of the two fields. e.g. Upstream-name: nano Variant: tiny I appreciate its probably something that is unlikely to change becasue it would only have a superficial benefit, thought it was worth mentioning anyway. Glenn
