On Sun, 01 May 2011, Bill Allombert wrote: > On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 09:00:14PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > > So the reason for imposing a length restriction on version numbers in > > particular is due to the UI display of aptitude? I'm a bit dubious that > > this is a good justification for a Policy rule. dpkg -l has truncated > > version numbers for forever at 14 characters, and I don't recall this > > being a major issue in the past. The thing that started off this thread, > > I thought, was the constraint on file name length in ISO images, which is > > the total length and doesn't impose a constraint specifically on the > > version. > > Also there are no technical requirement for packages filenames in ISO images > to be > canonical packages names. Packages filename can be mangled to fit the medium, > there > is a program 'dpkg-name' to recover the canonical packages name. This requires > the same mangling to be applied to the filenames in the Packages files, but > this > not an issue since the Packages file is in the same medium.
That could work, but I can certainly imagine non-uniqueness causing problems. .debs from inside a CD/DVD have this nasty tendency to show up in the most strange places. They don't stay put in that DVD/CD and get destroyed at the next point release. And it would cause problems for some tools, too. Assuming such package name reduction can be made to work safely, the question is: what would be the better solution in the long term? -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-cd-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110502212014.gb18...@khazad-dum.debian.net