Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Sarantis Paskalis]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 03:55:08PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > If upstreams are "sensitive", they choose a project name which, at 
> > the
> > implementation level, is compatible with their target group. If the
> > underlying file-system supports UTF-8, hardly anyone would care about
> > data files that use multi-byte characters. But the user interface is
> > what matters.
> >
> > We do have policies already about using American English in spec files
> > as opposed to British English and other languages. Package
> > descriptions
> > must be in US English, too, and other languages are secondary only.
> 
> This is Fedora-produced material. Our level of control on
> Fedora-produced material is higher than on upstream-produced material.

IMHO the Name tag in the spec file is also Fedora-produced material.
Viewed as such, Fedora can and should mandate the format of the package 
name.

If full Unicode encoding in package names is accepted then:
A non-English speaking user will still be presented with thousands of 
package names in Latin (us-ascii) encoding which are critical to the 
system with obscure names (kernel, glibc, glibc, firefox, etc.)  These 
names are not understandable or even readable by the vast majority of 
earth's population.  How is the experience of the non-English speaking 
user getting better by allowing one or two package names in their native 
tongue (Chinese, French, German)?  The most likely feeling would be that 
the distribution is minimally translated, or that the localization was 
started but later abandoned.

If Fedora wishes to go down the road of full localization, then it 
should prepare itself for translation/transliteration of _all_ the 
package names in the distribution for each language.  Anything else will 
just appear as a half baked approach to localization.

Thanks,

-- Sarantis