[katello-devel] Renaming of environments: summary

[Jan Pazdziora]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 03:13:37PM +0100, Dmitri Dolguikh wrote:
> >
> >That's clever, but is it really necessary? I'm not opposed to
> >using it as a way to generate labels. But you'll still want to
> >allow a user to enter their own label at creation time. They may
> >not want the autogenerated one.
>
> we are back to discussing discrimination against users not using
> ascii-based character sets.

Many parts of the computer systems have restrictions on the character
sets.

> In our case url of the resource is also its uri, and I'll put
> emphasis on unique here. No human can generate random enough
> information, and repeatedly asking the user to re-enter a bit of
> information is bad ui too. Much easier is to generate the bit
> automatically, leads to a better user interaction too.

So the solution is to do an equivalent of

	iconv -f utf8 -t us-ascii//TRANSLIT
	
plus change spaces and unprintable characters to underscores or
dashes, possibly in lowercase, to come up with some default. Then
check if the result is US-ASCII and if not, pre-fill some
generated string (UUID, possibly) there instead. And let the user
either accept the pre-filled default, or change it.

You get the best of both worlds -- label resembling the name where
possible, and something that the user cannot possibly remember but
still generated for them in case the Kanji cannot be transliterated
easily.

-- 
Jan Pazdziora
Principal Software Engineer, Satellite Engineering, Red Hat