-devs vs -dev

[Jason W]

We have 50 development extensions with the -dev suffix, and 78 that use -devs.  It makes it hard to remember extension names, having to look it up if, say, I wanted to install the dev package for lesstif but didn't remember if it was lesstif-dev or lesstif-devs. 

Though I used -devs for a long time, my preference would be to settle on -dev and -locale, rather than -devs and -locales.  Let me know if this is not agreeable.  Either way there is a bit of migration. But we do need to standardize on one or the other for the long haul.

[^thehatsrule^]

Sounds fine.  Same for -libs vs -lib?

[Jason W]

Yeah, -dev -lib -locale -doc.  In other words, no longer plural. 

[Kingdomcome]

Ive been grumbling quietly to myself about this issue over the past few months but decided it was worth bringing up to the group.  I totally support normalizing to one or the other, although I have no preference on which.

[maro]

Good idea!

I'd just like to suggest to give users a heads-up (e.g. via this thread) as you are about to change the names. I'd like to avoid re-downloading all those .tcz files for my private mirror, since I can do the renaming myself.

[bmarkus]

I wanted to add a p ragraph to the Creating Extensions section in the WIKI I'm updating, proposing the split up extensions and came across with the naming convention too.

Lets make a 'standard'. Personally all of my extensions are using -dev -doc -locale as I like shorter names and don't like -devs, but any common agreement is fine.

[jpeters]

Or we could just submit both: 

ntfs-3g-dev, ntfs-3g-devs

[bmarkus]

Or we could just submit both: 

ntfs-3g-dev, ntfs-3g-devs

Too much coffee ? 

[Jason W]

Ok,  as no one seems to have an issue with using -dev, -locale, -doc, -lib, etc, we will go ahead with it.

Extensions named -devs, -decs, -locales, -libs, etc will be turned away.  I will rename the existing as it would be good to get this process out of the way since is going to throw a monkey wrench in extension audit functions.  Hopefully I will finish it this week.

[bmarkus]

Also .dep files must be adjusted.

[Jason W]

Dep files will certainly be adjusted.  Now that we have determined that 4096 block size is good to go, I can remove the old backup of 128k bs extensions and make a copy of the current one online to work with.  With a few commands I can make the change that will rename the extensions and fix the info and dep files.  I could do it on my own mirror but it would take a couple of days to upload it all. 

[Jason W]

Rather, I will refresh my own mirror and make the changes there, and upload the changed files.  Safer and less stress that way.

[Jason W]

ALso, use a dash instead of an underscore.  Like -dev rather than _dev.  Underscores will also be rejected.  A standard will make life so much easier in maintaining the repo.

[Jason W]

It is done on my mirror.  ORBit and  GConf, libbonobo, gnome-vfs all had their version numbers removed and brought into naming conformance.  I will double check things this afternoon and upload tonight.

I will then hand prune the old files as I don't want to risk accidental deletion of wanted files on the main server.  The presence of the old files will not constitute a broken repo, but I will get them out of the way as soon as possible.

Base-devs has changed to base-dev, but gcc_libs remains the same.

[Jason W]

I will now start the uploading of the changed files.  Should be done in a few hours.

Though this will play havoc with appsaudit for existing tce collections for now, once this is out of the way and the standard is in place things should be a lot smoother with extension updates.

In fact, though library extensions are critical not to have version numbers in the names, our appsaudit tool and the upgrade process depends on extensions keeping the same name across upgrades.  So end use binaries are also much better off without version numbers in the name.  Library extensions are strictly prohibited from having version numbers in their names, but end use apps are strongly encouraged to follow suit.  If needed, names like icewm-current, or poppler-stable, or jwm-snapshot, or wget-svn can be used to indicate a difference between similar apps in the repo instead of version numbers.