Package rename creates hassle for maintainers

Binary package hint: python-rackspace-cloudservers

Shortly before Lucid was released, bug 563434 was filed, asking for this package to be renamed from python-cloudservers to python-rackspace-cloudservers. This is troublesome for a number of reasons:

Debian Python Policy section 2.2 says: "The binary package for module foo should preferably be named python-foo, if the module name allows, but this is not required if the binary package ships multiple modules.". This package provides a module named "cloudservers" (and no other modules), so per policy the correct name for this package is python-cloudservers.

My sponsor in Debian (Piotr Ożarowski) said he might have accepted a change to call the binary package "python-cloudservers-rackspace", but not "python-rackspace-cloudservers". Thinking this through (more so than I did when I was originally presented with bug 563434) I think his opinion on this subject is perfectly reasonable.

As for the source package name, upstream called their package "python-cloudservers". This may not be popular, but nevertheless, that is the name it was given. As such, calling the source package anything other than "python-cloudservers" seems very wrong to me (regardless of what we call the binary package). Not only is it wrong, but it makes it exceedingly annoying to maintain the package. It cannot be autosynced, MoM will give it no love, and the bzr branches for the two source packages will not (I think) detect their common ancestry.

In short, I'd like to suggest that the source package is renamed to python-cloudservers and ideally the binary as well (to follow policy).