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

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Wed Feb 27 01:43:37 UTC 2008


On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 16:58 -0500, Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 23:19 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:

> 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),
Whether something is hard to type is a matter of the locale one is
using. It's relative to one's cultural background.


Have a look at the package currently under review:
écolier-courts-fonts


How many people would be able to type this package's name to install it?

Personal experience with my last name (contains an "é") tells me, the
majority of people with a French, Portuguese or Spanish language
background are able to do so. The majority of people outside of this
group (Noteworthy: The naive ASCII-typing/English-speaking world) isn't.

Similar considerations apply to any other arbitrary non-ASCII char.

> but how many chances are that everybody suddenly will start doing
> that?

Devil's advocate question: Why should a 16 year old student in an
arbitrary country not use his native language/charset for his package's
name?

That said, I would consider these chances to be increasing with the size
of the non-English speaking Linux user-base, who are not aware about the
historic and cultural issues of i18n.

> 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.
In bugzilla, I had proposed the opposite: 

Mandate ASCII-only _package names_ (=> ASCII-only file names), but
additionally allow alternative (utf-8) "Provides" if desired.
This would allow GUI tools to display these utf-names, while it would
help keep things simple for command-line tools.

Ralf






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