Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 01:25 -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>> 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.
> Transliterate/translate them to ASCII.
>
This is a proposal I am strongly -1 to.

1) I am against doing this at the Fedora level because of the potential 
for different, non-obvious names to proliferate at the distro level to 
confuse end-users.

2) Translation and transliteration are two entirely different means of 
taking a word in one language into another and will yield two entirely 
separate ASCII strings.  Leaving this ambiguous will exacerbate #1.

3) Collisions.  Transliteration can cause collisions between different 
languages and homophones within a language.  Translation is just as bad.

>>   My -1 vote is really a vote against having the Fedora 
>> packager make up a name for an upstream package which I very strongly 
>> oppose.
> Why would this be a problem? 
> 
> May-be this is a problem with "pictographic" charsets (May-be
> traditional Chinese), but I am having difficulties to imagine this to be
> a problem elsewhere, because most (all?) languages have an nominal
> transliteration/translation to ASCII.
> 
It is not as simple as you make out.  With "pictographic" charsets (not 
only traditional Chinese) different languages may pronounce a character 
in different ways.  So the transliteration will depend on the language 
the naming author was envisioning when they created it.

This isn't limited to pictographic languages.  For instance, look at 
wikipedia's current rules on transliterating Cyrillic:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(Cyrillic)

Other things to note from wikipedia are that they have multiple methods 
of transliterating from cyrillic within a language depending on the 
usage of the word and whether it currently has a common transliteration. 
  I think this is just too complex an issue for us to say there is one 
logical and right way to transliterate a name and expect every other 
distro to use the same conventions.  This needs to be done cross-distro 
at least, upstream if possible.

-Toshio

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