KISS in Guidelines/Micro-Optimizations (was: Re: Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting)

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Thu Mar 13 08:59:44 UTC 2008


On 13.03.2008 07:25, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>>>> "VS" == Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta at iki.fi> writes:
>> VS> And by the way, in my opinion the discussion should not be only
>> VS> about Unicode, but about restricting package names even to a
>> VS> subset of ASCII (let's say eg.  a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, +, _, .).

FWIW, +1

>> This is why we need a concrete proposal to vote on.  Things would have
>> gone much better if we had one.
> +1
> One of the problems I have with "ban packages with unicode names" is 
> that it doesn't consider what to do when a package name upstream is 
> non-ASCii. 

Well, I see your point, but on the other hand: do we need to have
details like those you outline in the guidelines?  There is enough in
there already and they are hard to read and understand.

Further: And does the FPC really need and want to solve details like
this? Trying to sort those out is of course a respectable goal, but it's
not yet a big problem afaics.

So maybe it really just as simple as saying "ban packages with unicode
names". or, to be more precise, make it something like: "Package names
are limited to 'a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, +, _, .' If you have a package with a
different problem come to fedora-packaging-list and discuss with us;
once we solved it in a few packages we can write a page like 'Hints how
to adjust package names if they contain non-ASCII characters'".

That's easier for everyone. And then the problem can be solved step by
step over time by those that are effected together with the FPC members.
The 'Hints how to adjust...' page for that of course could and should be
separated from the guidelines and not protected by the ACLs for easy
maintenance.


The reason why I write this mail is because I think we over optimize
things and try to regulate to many details (in Fedora in general, not
specific to the FPC). That's afaics a lot of work for the committees
(which we need for more important things), feels like bureaucracy for
the packagers and slows us down more and more as things get more
complicated. And even worse, you can think hours how to solve problems
and all their details, you'll miss one or two special cases often, so a
"hits page" maintained by those that are effected is IMHO a way better
place for details than the guidelines.

> [...]

Just my 2 cent.

CU
knurd




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