Anaconda Enterprise: Documentation

# Package naming conventions

Names and versions of software packages do not follow any prescribed rules. However, in order to facilitate communication and documentation, conda employs the following naming conventions with respect to packages:

package name
  The name of a package, without any reference to a particular version. Conda package names are normalized, and may contain only lowercase alpha characters, numeric digits, underscores, hyphens, or dots. In usage documentation, these will be referred to by package_name.

package version
  A version number or string, often similar to X.Y or X.Y.Z, but may take other forms as well.

build string
  An arbitrary string that identifies a particular build of a package for conda. It may contain suggestive mnemonics but these are subject to change and should not be relied upon or attempted to be parsed for any specific information.

canonical name
  The canonical name consists of the package name, version, and build string joined together by hyphens: name-version-buildstring. In usage documentation, these will be referred to by canonical_name.

file name
  conda package filenames are canonical names, plus the suffix .tar.bz2.

These components are illustrated in the following figure:

Different parts of conda package names.

Additionally, a package specification is a package name, together with a package version (which may be partial or absent), joined by “=”. Here are some examples:

- python=2.7.3
- python=2.7
- python

In usage documentation, these will be referred to by package_spec.