As the load on maintainers of archives like Sunsite, the PSA site 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 dash, followed by a version number, extension, and other suffixes.
Let's suppose you have a project you call `foobar' at version 1, release 2, level 3. If it's got just one archive part (presumably the sources), here's what its names should look
The source archive
The LSM file (asuming you're submitting to Sunsite).
Please don't use these:
This looks to many programs like an archive for a project called`foobar123' with no version number.
This looks to many programs like an archive for a project called `foobar1' at version 2.3.
Many programs think this goes with a project called `foobar-v1'.
The underscore is hard for people to speak, type, and remember
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:
sources
binaries, type not specified
ELF binaries
ELF binaries statically linked
SPARC binaries
Please don't use names like `foobar-ELF-1.2.3.tar.gz', because programs have a hard time telling type infixes (like `-ELF') fromn the stem.
A good general form of name has these parts in order:
The stem prefix should be common to all a project's files, and it should be easy to read, type, and remember. So please don't use underscores. And don't capitalize or BiCapitalize without extremely good reason -- it messes up the natural human-eyeball search order and looks like some marketing weenie trying to be clever.
It confuses people whe twon different projects have the same stem name. So try to check for collisions before your first release. A good place to check is the index file of Sunsite.