Package: debian-policy Version: 3.9.8.0 Hi. I'm afraid I have opened a can of worms. Now I will enumerate the worms for your delectation and delight. Luckily I think the worms are not too slimy or numerous, even though one of them has eaten the firefox package and is consequently very large.
dpkg-source format `3.0 (quilt)' supports what it calls `additional orig tarballs', named <package>-<upstreamvsn>.orig-<component>.tar.<ext> The documentation in dpkg-source(1) says component can only contain alphanumeric characters and hyphens This allows the possibility of uppercase letters [1]. But of course distinguishing case of letters is troublesome for some computers. This specification makes it possible for two different source package component files to exist with names which differ only in the case of some of the letters - perhaps, even two files which are part of the very same package version and must necessarily exist side by side. It seems obvious to me that any reliance on case here is undesirable. Furthermore, I discovered this by discovering that an important actual package (firefox) uses upppercase letters in many of its orig tarball names (!) (I erroneously mishandled this case in dgit, due to not reading the spec properly. This caused lossage to a Debian downstream. #916926.) I would like to arrange, somehow, that our tools and policies ensure that filename clashes cannot occur even on case-insensitive filesystems. I don't think we can solve this in dpkg. All it could is reject all uppercase letters. That is not backward compatible: we don't want to add to the situations where it is not possible to edit and rebuild an old source package. It might be possible to address this in tools like dak and reprepro by having them apply their uniqueness restrictions to case-smashed versions of the filenames. However this seems fiddly and ugly to me. Also it is not ideal to do this so late in the package management workflow. (We've had trouble with orig filename reuse in the past...) I suggest instead that we deprecate uppercase letters in quilt orig component names in Debian policy, and back that up with a lintian warning. This is in some sense over-restrictive since it forbids even situations where the filenames are case-insensitively-unique. Existing packages would need to transition their arrangements for orig handling so that the origs had all-lowercase names; this would be a mild extra inconvenience for them, but would not have to be done in any kind of hurry. Eventually, when everything is converted, the restriction could be made firm (MUST; lintian error) and that would get us into a situation where we can't accidentally mess this up in the future. What do you think ? I have CC'd various people, including in particular the firefox maintainers (who I am proposing to inconvenience - sorry about that). Ian. [1] Technically the spec also allows the possibility of non-ASCII letters and numbes but I doubt anyone would read that that was intended and I am confident that dpkg-source would actually reject those. -- Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own. If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.
