[Fedora-packaging] UTF-8 package names

Peter Gordon peter at thecodergeek.com
Wed Feb 27 02:08:10 UTC 2008


On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 10:25 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Pro ASCII:
> * Hard to type unicode package names, therefore it is a usability problem.
> * Is there a limit?  Even if European letters are fine what about Kanji 
> or Sanskrit?

Japanese package names would really be odd here. Would we spell the
package name with its kanji or its phonetic (e.g., hiragana) reading?
For example, say there were a package called 「勉強」 (Rōmaji:
"benkyoo", English: study) which had flash-cards or some helpful
studying software. Would we name this package by this Kanji, or its
hiragana equivalent
「べんきょう」? Would we require the package to have Provides for this
kana reading if named in Kanji, and vice-versa? What about
transliterations (so-called "Rōmaji"): What transliteration system [1]
should we use? 

If we do require the Provides, what if two packages end up being
different kanji names that are homophones (read the same, phonetically)?
One example that comes to mind is between 花 and 華 (both flower) and 鼻
(nose), all read as "hana" (hiragana: はな)? For even more fun, 神
(god), 紙 (paper), and 髮 (hair) all have readings of "kami" (かみ). And
extending this to kanji compounds will yield even further enjoyment:
明日 (tomorrow) can be read as "asu" (あす) or "ashita" (あした), and 昨
日 (yesterday) can be read as "kinoo" (きのう) or "sakujitsu" (さくじ
つ) depending on formality. 

I suppose it would be similar for other languages based on both phonetic
and logographic scripts, but I use Japanese as my example since that's
what I'm attempting to learn currently. :)

What about misc technical characters too - arrows (← → ↑ ↓) or the like?
This can get quite overwhelming if we're not very careful.

In closing, I think it would be best to limit this to diacritic/accented
characters. With an additional transliterated Provides, the ease case
would be satisified, without the complexities provided by such writing
systems as above.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rōmaji#Modern_systems

(And as a completely tangential aside, SCIM is *awesome*.)
-- 
Peter Gordon (codergeek42)
GnuPG Public Key ID: 0xFFC19479 / Fingerprint:
  DD68 A414 56BD 6368 D957 9666 4268 CB7A FFC1 9479
  

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-packaging/attachments/20080226/d80a89bf/attachment.sig>


More information about the Fedora-packaging mailing list