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The Art of Unix Programming
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Unix Programming - Best Practices for Working with Open-Source Developers - Good Project- and Archive-Naming Practice

Good Project- and Archive-Naming Practice

As the load on maintainers of archives like ibiblio, SourceForge, and CPAN increases, there is an increasing trend for submissions to be processed partly or wholly by programs (rather than entirely by a human).

This makes it more important for project and archive-file names to fit regular patterns that computer programs can parse and understand.

It's helpful to everybody if your archive files all have GNU-like names — all-lower-case alphanumeric stem prefix, followed by a hyphen, followed by a version number, extension, and other suffixes.

A good general form of name has these parts in order:

  1. project prefix

  2. dash

  3. version number

  4. dot

  5. “src” or “bin” (optional)

  6. dot or dash (dot preferred)

  7. binary type and options (optional)

  8. archiving and compression extensions

Name stems in this style can contain hyphen or underscores to separate syllables; dashes are actually preferred. It is good practice to group related projects by giving the stems a common hyphen-terminated prefix.

Let's suppose you have a project you call ‘foobar’ at major version 1, minor version or release 2, patchlevel 3. If it's got just one archive part (presumably the sources), here's what its names should look like like:

foobar-1.2.3.tar.gz

The source archive.

foobar.lsm

The LSM file (assuming you're submitting to ibiblio).

Please don't use names like these:

foobar123.tar.gz

This looks to many programs like an archive for a project called “foobar123” with no version number.

foobar1.2.3.tar.gz

This looks to many programs like an archive for a project called “foobar1” at version 2.3.

foobar-v1.2.3.tar.gz

Many programs think this goes with a project called “foobar-v1”.

foo_bar-1.2.3.tar.gz

The underscore is hard for people to speak, type, and remember.

FooBar-1.2.3.tar.gz

Unless you like looking like a marketing weenie. This is also hard for people to speak, type, and remember.

If you have to differentiate between source and binary archives, or between different kinds of binary, or express some kind of build option in the file name, please treat that as a file extension to go after the version number. That is, please do this:

foobar-1.2.3.src.tar.gz

Sources.

foobar-1.2.3.bin.tar.gz

Binaries, type not specified.

foobar-1.2.3.bin.i386.tar.gz

i386 binaries.

foobar-1.2.3.bin.i386.static.tar.gz

i386 binaries statically linked.

foobar-1.2.3.bin.SPARC.tar.gz

SPARC binaries.

Please don't use names like ‘foobar-i386-1.2.3.tar.gz’, because programs have a hard time telling type infixes (like ‘-i386’) from the stem.

The convention for distinguishing major from minor release is simple: you increment the patch level for fixes or minor features, the minor version number for compatible new features, and the major version number when you make incompatible changes.


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The Art of Unix Programming
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