Package (mandatory)

The Package field defines the name of the package referenced by that control file.

The name of a package is limited in a few ways: characters, length, and a few names are reserved.

The allowed characters in package names are digits (0-9), lowercase latin letters (a-z), and the plus (+), minus (-), and period (.) special characters.

Although Debian does not prevent you from using one of the special characters at the end of a package name, we prevent those there. Also the first character must be a digit or a letter too.

The corresponding regular expression is: [0-9a-z][-+.0-9a-z]*[0-9a-z]

Notice that this regular expression forces you to have a name that's at least 2 characters. Packages with one character are not legal. At this point, the maximum length is 256 characters. Such a long name is already quite crazy anyway!

Note that uppercase letters are not allowed in the name. wpkg is not expected to be used on a system that only supports uppercase letters (i.e. MS-DOS.)

The packager reserves all of the following package names:

• aux
• com1, com2, com3, com4, com5, com6, com7, com8, com9
• con
• core
• lpt1,lpt2, lpt3, lpt4, lpt5,lpt6, lpt7, lpt8, lpt9
• nul
• prn
• tmp

You just cannot use any one of those names for your package.

Most of the names are reserved because these are device names under MS-Windows and files cannot use those names.

The tmp and core names are reserved because we use two sub-directories in the packager database with those names. We do not have any concerns anyway because those two names would probably not make very good sense in your environment (instead of just "core" you probably want to give your package a name such as "snap-core".)