[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Removing hash from binary package name

[Luca Bruno]

Hi all,
this is a brainstorming mail, mostly to Angus (who planned the initial split)
and to everybody else for comments.

My question is: do we specifically need hashes in binary package name?
Corollary is: can we rename libstd-rust-deadbeef to libstd-rust-1.x
(at some point in the future)?

We partially touched this topic in the discussion about nightlies.
It is my understanding that we are using the hash in package name to mimic
some kind of soname matching, but anyway we have overrides in place to keep
lintian happy and we don't really have C-style transitions.

As such, I wonder if we can just swap the hash with the full version in future
revisions, or if there are some corner-cases I'm not seeing.

As an additional point for discussion, given that we are not strictly bound by
soname, we could think about keeping the same package name when uploading beta
channel to experimental and later for stable release.

I still have mixed feeling on all of this, as I see both pros and cons:
 + hash-less package names seem friendlier for users
 - hash-ed names directly match with content
 + we could speed up NEW-queuing by uploading betas to experimental, earlier
 + we can reduce the number of trips through NEW
 - hashes will change between betas/stable, but package name won't
   (BUT hash changes will only happen in betas, which will only hit experimental)
 + at the moment, only rustc needs to known about hashes, sysroot, etc.
   (rust won´t have ABI stability for some time)

Your comments?

Cheers, Luca

-- 
 .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux **  | Luca Bruno (kaeso)
: :'  :   The Universal O.S.    | lucab (AT) debian.org
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  `-     http://www.debian.org 	| Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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