Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: Application name in metadata.xml

[Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, 2012-02-12 at 20:37 +0100, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Sun, 12 Feb 2012, Paweł Hajdan, wrote:
> 
> > On 2/11/12 2:00 PM, Fabio Erculiani wrote:
> >> Other distros associate a more user-friendly package name
> >> (application name) to packages.
> >> Say, they bind libreoffice-writer to "LibreOffice Writer" in
> >> package metadata.
> 
> [Replying to a random message in this thread.]
> 
> Why do you think that writing the package name in mixed case and with
> embedded white space would be more "user friendly"?

because-removing-all-upper-case-spaces-and-punctuation-from-a-string
makes it less readable to a non-programmer.

> >> How about expanding metadata.xml (adding to its .dtd) to also
> >> support this?
> 
> I still don't see what this would buy us. So far we have a unique
> identifier (namely ${CATEGORY}/${PN}) for our packages. Introducing
> another name will water this down and cause confusion for users, in
> the first place.
> 
> So, can you point out what are the advantages of your proposal?
> Are they large enough to outweigh the confusion arising?

Users know a package's "natural name", not the occasionally cryptic
ebuild name, and certainly not the category. If I want to install a game
called "Neverwinter Nights", it may not be immediately apparent to me
that I should emerge something called "games-rpg/nwn".

Adding the natural name to metadata would allow users to more easily
find the packages they need via packages.gentoo.org and tools like eix.

-Alexandre