Hi, This is following up on a brief conversation I was part of in IRC (#fedora-devel) earlier:
I've never been quite sure how to name packages written in Python when they are just applications. Many "applications" written in Python still install themselves using distutils or setuptools, and so install a "module" into the site_packages directory. By a strict interpretation of our Python packaging guidelines [1] [2], python 3 "modules" MUST be packaged as "python3-name". Since technically any nontrivial Python application that can be installed via distutils or setuptools likely installs a module, this strict interpretation of the guidelines would mean that software that happens to be written in Python but does not intend to provide a library must be named with the python3-* prefix. I am not sure that this is intended (since there's definitely software in the distribution written in Python not named with a python prefix). If this is not intended, then it would be nice if we could reword the guideline to be more clear. If it is intended, I'm prepared to argue that the current guideline is too strict and should be revisited, both from a practical position (users looking for software called "foobar" who many not care whether or not it's written in Python will be confused if it is packaged under the name "python-foobar" in Fedora), and from a philosophical one (we don't put the "lib" prefix on every library package if upstream doesn't use that as their name because we generally try to respect the way upstream names their software). As a counter-proposal I would suggest that, as we currently do, we require the python3-prefix to be provided by the package, but explicitly leave it to the packager+reviewer's discretion whether or not the prefix must be part of the real name, too. Some other languages do already do this: nodejs [3] and ocaml [4] both explicitly have "if this primarily provides a tool or application" clauses in their naming guidelines. I think it makes sense to have something similar for Python, to help avoid confusion. Ben Rosser [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Naming#Python_modules [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Python#Provides [3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Node.js?rd=Node.js/#Naming_Guidelines [4] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Naming#OCaml_modules _______________________________________________ python-devel mailing list -- python-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org
