UTF-8 and filenames

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 23:35 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 20:26 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I'm thinking of writing a draft guideline for the packaging committee to
> > mandate all filenames be in utf-8.  Theoretically, I think this is the
> > right thing to do as :
> > 
> > 1) UTF8 is the native encoding of our filesystems
> > 2) UTF8 is what the distro as a whole has migrated to
> > 3) There's no encoding information stored with the filename so having
> > filenames in arbitrary encodings is a recipe for disaster.
> > 
> > Since I am not an expert in i18n issues I'm posting for some feedback
> > here first.  What do people think?  Is this the right thing to do?  Are
> > there some prominent examples of where this is wrong?
> > 
> 
> It is certainly the right thing to do, but I have to wonder how relevant
> this is. Apart from the newly introduced translated directory names in
> xdg-user-dirs, I can't think of any examples of non-ASCII filenames in
> packages...

The tools that we're building (package database, koji, etc) currently
assume that we'll only encounter UTF-8 filenames.  We've found at least
one package (aspell-is) which currently has a non-UTF-8 filename so we
want to decide if these cases should be considered packaging bugs or if
we need to build some sort of support for this into our tools.  Does
this need to be a packaging guideline?  Perhaps not but where else does
it fit?  We could tuck it in as one of the things rpmlint reports and
not list it explicitly but it is something that we are going to always
want fixed (whereas we allow people to dispute many of the other errors
and warnings reported by rpmlint.)

-Toshio
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