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

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mardi 26 février 2008 à 20:55 +0200, Axel Thimm a écrit :
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 10:25:45AM -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > Pro ASCII:
> > * Hard to type unicode package names, therefore it is a usability problem.

The solution to this particular problem has already been suggested by
someone else: just have an ASCII transliteration alias as additional
Provides.

> > * Some pieces of software won't handle unicode package names and will need 
> > to be fixed.

That's too bad for them :p

> Also consider that package names define the file set that is to
> bemirrored and you thus need to assume that all mirrors properly
> support utf on their filesystems and their ftp/web/rsync servers.

Is this really a problem? File systems do not interpret file names, so
they are going to store byte strings as they get them. The typical UTF-8
problems you get are apps that write invalid UTF-8 names because they
think they'll be interpreted as something else, or apps that display
UTF-8 names wrong because they think they've been written in another
encoding (and try to translate from this encoding to UTF-8), but
low-level mirroring tools are just going to reproduce file names as-is.

(that is unless you use one of the few non-unix/non-posix systems that
store filename encoding information in the filesystem, but those can not
import foreign filesystem data without the admin defining the encoding
to use anyway)

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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