Package policies

The Alpine Linux Package Policies describe some of the policies when creating packages.

Package Names

• All package names should be lowercase.
• Development files are placed in subpackages with -dev suffix (e.g. uclibc-dev)
• Documentation files (incl. man pages) are placed in subpackages with -doc suffix (e.g. expat-doc)
• Lua modules (not applications) are prefixed with lua-. (e.g. lua-posix)
• Perl modules (not applications) are prefixed with perl-. (e.g. perl-xml-parser)
• Python 2 modules (not applications) are prefixed with py2-. (e.g. py2-libxml2) (Python3 is used exclusively in current alpine versions)
• Python 3 modules (not applications) are prefixed with py3-. (e.g. py3-libxml2)
• Kernels and third party modules should be suffixed with the kernel flavor. (e.g., -grsec, -vserver).

1. Don't use - sign in kernel flavor name.
2. Specify KERNEL_FLAVOR_DEFAULT as your kernel flavor if you want boot your kernel by default.

Package versions

• Package versions are similar to gentoo or other distributions, e.g. 10.2.33, 4.5_alpha, 20200712-r0:

1. See Semantic Versioning
2. Alpha, release candidates (_rc2), etc are prefixed with underscore _ not a hyphen.
3. Subsequent package versions are -r0, -r1, and so on; the number is from $pkgver.
4. Subsequent package fixes are _p0, _p1.
5. Test your proposed version with apk, for example apk version --check 3.2.1-rcN. The result is nothing if it is valid.

Licensing

• The license identifier used is the short-identifier SPDX.
• The license of the program should be based on the licenses approved by the Free Software Foundation or OSI.
• If you are unsure about the license, please ask in our IRC channel.