[Fedora-packaging] Re: UTF-8 package names

Simo Sorce ssorce at redhat.com
Tue Feb 26 21:58:44 UTC 2008


On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 23:19 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> Which is the problem. Since this is not any metadata you store
> anywhere it is something defined locally. And if you mirror the raw
> UTF8 filenames onto a mirror that has set local policy to be latin1
> the web server will serve funny ~A names.

So are you claiming that mirrors can't be fixed ?
You know, it is very easy to test how many would break with an utf-8
name, just add somewhere an unused file with an utf-8 name and check if
any mirror breaks.

(not referring to you Axel from now on)
I think that resistance against standardizing around utf8 is getting
ridiculous at this point. I understand that people that never used
anything but ASCII may find it annoying that there are people out there
that use funny characters, but I wonder when they will realize that they
are the minority in the world, and that the others would like to be
treated like first class citizens like everybody else.

Unless there is a very compelling technical problem, I think we should
try as hard as possible to support and use by default utf8 everywhere.
The more we use it, the more we uncover bugs that we can hopefully fix.

And yes, I understand that a package name that is written in pure
Cyrillic or Chinese, or Japanese maybe hard initially to swallow (and
type), but how many chances are that everybody suddenly will start doing
that? Upstream is usually not stupid and understands that using non
ASCII characters may limit distribution. I guess only packages that make
sense only locally "may" end up with something like a completely
non-ASCII name.

If this is really a usability problem I am sure that the proposal to
provide an alternate ASCII only name (need rules to determine how you
get from non-ASCII to ASCII) is a very good one, even if copy&paste, or
other UIs can be used as well.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York




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