This page describes the Debian packaging policy for translators.

Package Naming Scheme

Candidates for package naming schemes (foofs is a filesystem based translator, e.g. tarfs, bar is a node based translator, e.g. random):

• foofs-translator, bar-translator [current favourite]

• foofs, bar [this will make searching somewhat more of a hassle and may easily conflict with already used package names]

• foofs-trans, bar-trans

• hurd-translator-foofs, hurd-translator-bar

Do we need to destinguish between file system and node based translators?

Source packages should be called whatever the tarball/cvs module says.

Where to Put Files

The translators should go into /hurd.

What about setting passive translators in /servers or /dev?

The idea is that the package should set passive translators in its postinst instructions.

There may, however, be difficulties with that: it's perfectly valid to have two different random translator packages installed (they won't conflict with each other as long as their file names don't clash), but which one should sit on /dev/random and /dev/urandom? Debian's alternatives system doesn't help here, because the translators may need different command line arguments.

One idea is to have the postinst instructions set the passive translator if there isn't already one set on the relevant node(s).

Short/Long Description Guidelines

[packagename]: Foo translator for [doing bar].
Foo is a GNU/Hurd translator which does [bar].

Miscellaneous

There could / should be a meta package (or even more than one) that just depends e.g. on all installable translators, so that they'll conveniently find their way into the system by just installing that meta package.

-- ?MichaelBanck - 10 Mar 2006