Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Hans de Goede]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 14:29 +0300, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
>> Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>  * Ban unicode in package names (no draft submitted)
>>>   * Not accepted
>>>   
>> Oops...
>> The example of such an unicode name used is "écolier-fonts" .
>>
>> Then consider any user in non-latin1 locale. For example, my locale is 
>> Russian. I have no "é" on my keyboard...
> You are reiterating my mantra, which had been the reason for me to
> propose banning unicode in package names.
> 
> Unfortunately, my FPC colleagues seem to be keen on shooting themselves
> into their foot and to be keen on letting Fedora's usability to regress
> further.
> 
>> Well, I can use cut and paste, when I have a mouse and the text is 
>> already shown on my desktop.
>> But what I have to do, when use just the cmdline interface? IOW, without 
>> any GUI -- just the Linux console, or remote ssh session? How can I fill 
>> the "é" character then?
>>
>> It seems that the only way to operate with such a filename is to use 
>> shell wildcards: "rpm -qa \?colier-fonts"  etc.
>>
>> Does it mean, that the command line interface as well as any other 
>> non-GUI core applications are now deprecated? ;)
> 
> Apparently that's what Fedora is heading to - Too many kids around, whio
> have grown up with Win, I suppose.
> 

You guys are blowing this way out of proportion, it would seriously help to 
read the actual irc log. Also its too bad that it wasn't made clear in the 
summary that this was not on the agenda, but only something discussed during 
the free discussion phase at the end of the meeting.

AFAIK the whole FPC does not want to allow unicode names at the moment, but we 
don't want to forbid them for now and ever on also, which is what the current 
proposal basicly says.

What would be good to have is a more balanced proposal which:
1) Explains that for now unicode filenames, and thus packagenames are forbidden
    because we don't know if our infrastructure is ready
2) Lays out a plan (involving for example a test repo with unicode filenames,
    and asking a few mirrors to try and sync to this in a _separate_ cronjob)
    for making sure that our infrastructure gets fixed to handle this.
3) Calls for a revisit of this issue once the infra is ready.

And then, when we reach step 3 (like with F-12), we can discuss all the 
perceived usability issues, atm unicode package / filenames should simply not 
be used!


Regards,

Hans (speaking for myself, not the FPC)