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

Axel Thimm Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
Wed Feb 27 15:52:07 UTC 2008


On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 04:58:44PM -0500, Simo Sorce wrote:
> 
> 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 ?

No, anything, but my car can be fixed, but are you willing to take on
the task to support all admins current and future to properly migrate
to utf8 whether it's a Fedora/RHEL/Debian/Solaris OS of arbitrary age
running on the mirror?

> 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.

Actually most people against using UTF8 are such that got bitten by
the encoding problems, e.g. living in a locale that actually uses
non-ASCII characters. I have had to fix too many times encoding errors
of say Übersetzungen.tex and �bersetzungen.tex to use the
transiliterated Uebersetzungen.tex.

> 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 what will happen if I can't even read the package's name like say
an arabic version of libenese-fonts. Even if I can read libanese, if I
haven'z installed the font, the package will display as many empty
boxes to me to select from (among many other packages with empty
boxes). You run into a catch22 situation here.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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