[Fedora-packaging] UTF-8 package names

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Wed Feb 27 01:33:33 UTC 2008


Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 23:09, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 13:54 -0500, seth vidal wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 13:49 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>>>> Bill Nottingham (notting at redhat.com) said: 
>>>>> The biggest issue I could see is that any issues in handling such a package
>>>>> would need to be fixed *everywhere* that package is deployed, whether it
>>>>> be current Fedora, earlier Fedora, or EPEL. It may not be practical to
>>>>> deploy such fixes everywhere.
>> To me, these are the least issues. They are of a technical nature and
>> can be overcome/fixed (utf-8)
>>
>> My concern is usability of the distro. 
>>
>> IMO, we can not avoid to restrict certain aspects of the distro to the
>> least common denominator. Package-names are such a case.
>>
>>>> Consider, for example, that such a package breaks bugzilla. Although I
>>>> suppose that's one way to avoid getting bug reports.
>>>>
>>> /me renames yum to ᶨᶬⱴ
>> Is this Farsi, Arab or Hebrew?
>>
>> Proposal: Let's rename the bodhi and koji packages + their primary
>> executables into their Indian rsp. Japanese equivalents :)
> 
> I, for one, have nothing against 工事. At least I wouldn't have to cringe
> at the bad romanization that's used all over the place. :P
> 
> As for executables, you can always do something like
> # ln -s 工事 /usr/bin/koji
> and ship both... just kidding.
> 
This does bring up on interesting point.  The package name has been 
brought up as a usability concern for those who aren't used to trying to 
type non-ASCii characters.  However if an upstream was producing a 
program whose binary was non-ASCii we'd currently allow inclusion (and I 
would be even more opposed to changing that without getting upstream to 
make the change than changing the package name.)

For a possible valid use, think of this potential pair of tools for 
students learning Japanese:
/usr/bin/ひらがな2rōmaji
/usr/bin/rōmaji2ひらがな

> Although this discussion sheds an entirely new light on l10n/i18n. Imagine
> a fully localised system, where not only messages, but also everything else
> is translated into local language.
> 
> /me imagines typing (pl_PL.UTF-8 locale)
> 
> $ znajdź . -typ p -upr 0600 -drukuj
 >
 > Oh, the horror. ;)

Nonsense!  Since there are so many things on the filesystem which aren't 
real words (what's a "usr", what's a "gnumeric"?) we should obviously 
forgo translation and instead do transliteration!  :-)

-Toshio

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