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).

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

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

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

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.