Bill Nottingham wrote :
Toshio Kuratomi (a.badger(a)gmail.com) said:
> Today the Packaging Committee began a discussion of whether package names
> should be allowed to contain the full range of Unicode characters (encoded
> as UTF-8) or be restricted to the ASCii subset.
>
> This is a bit of a contentious issue with the Packaging Committee members
> split but not yet set in stone about how to proceed.
>
> The main arguments seem to be:
> Pro Unicode:
> * Upstream knows best what name is most appropriate for their users. For us
> to change it locally in Fedora doesn't make much sense.
> * We allow Unicode in every other piece of the spec so why not in the
> package name?
> * We should be shaking out bugs in the handling of Unicode in our software
> rather than hiding issues with it.
>
> 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?
> * Some pieces of software won't handle unicode package names and will need
> to be fixed.
The biggest issue I could see is that any issues in handling such a package
would need to be fixed *everywhere* that package is deployed, whether it
be current Fedora, earlier Fedora, or EPEL. It may not be practical to
deploy such fixes everywhere.
Not only where the packages are deployed, but also available from :
Some of the ftp/http mirror servers that will be serving the packages
might become a problem...
Matthias
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