It's helpful to everybody if your archive files all have GNU-like names — all-lower-case alphanumeric stem prefix, followed by a hyphen, followed by a version number, extension, and other suffixes.

A good general form of name has these parts in order:

Name stems in this style can contain hyphen or underscores to separate syllables; dashes are actually preferred. It is good practice to group related projects by giving the stems a common hyphen-terminated prefix.

Let's suppose you have a project you call ‘foobar’ at major version 1, minor version or release 2, patchlevel 3. If it's got just one archive part (presumably the sources), here's what its names should look like like:

Please don't use names like these:

If you have to differentiate between source and binary archives, or between different kinds of binary, or express some kind of build option in the file name, please treat that as a file extension to go after the version number. That is, please do this:

Please don't use names like ‘foobar-i386-1.2.3.tar.gz’, because programs have a hard time telling type infixes (like ‘-i386’) from the stem.

The convention for distinguishing major from minor release is simple: you increment the patch level for fixes or minor features, the minor version number for compatible new features, and the major version number when you make incompatible changes.

The stem prefix should be common to all of a project's files, and it should be easy to read, type, and remember. So please don't use underscores. And don't capitalize or BiCapitalize without extremely good reason — it messes up the natural human-eyeball search order and looks like some marketing weenie trying to be clever.