Re: Why ban underscores?

[Mark H Weaver]

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr> writes:

> Indeed, underscores were explicitly banned in 2014 (commit 
> 25083588).  Why?
>
> Where's the advantage in renaming the following packages from 
> their canonical names?

While I was not involved in this decision, I think it's desirable to
standardize on a single hyphen-like character.  Otherwise, it is likely
that people who prefer "_" over "-" will start using "_" in newly added
package names, which could lead to a proliferation of undesirable
diversity in our choices of hyphen-like characters.  Then, we'd all have
to remember when typing a package name: "is this one of those packages
that uses underscores instead of hyphens?"

       Mark