Ralf Corsepius wrote:
So propose banning the package until upstream changes the name, gives an official transliteration to ASCII, or a cross-distro group decides on a transliterated name for it (It was just mentioned to me that there's a new mailing list and project for cross-distro collaboration. It's early in its development so this may or may not develop into the kind of place where this kind of collaboration would take place[1]_).On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 09:41 -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:Ralf Corsepius wrote:On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 01:25 -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:One of the problems I have with "ban packages with unicode names" is that it doesn't consider what to do when a package name upstream is non-ASCii.Transliterate/translate them to ASCII.This is a proposal I am strongly -1 to.IMO, you are making fuzz about nothing. For most languages such native transliterations exist.It is not as simple as you make out. With "pictographic" charsets (not only traditional Chinese) different languages may pronounce a character in different ways.My -1 vote is really a vote against having the Fedora packager make up a name for an upstream package which I very strongly oppose.Why would this be a problem?May-be this is a problem with "pictographic" charsets (May-be traditional Chinese), but I am having difficulties to imagine this to be a problem elsewhere, because most (all?) languages have an nominal transliteration/translation to ASCII.That's why I mentioned them. It's a place I can imagine (I don't speak any Asian language nor can I write any of them), translation/transliteration could become problematic.So the transliteration will depend on the language the naming author was envisioning when they created it.Yes - But ask yourself: What is better, naming a package "koji" or seeing an (In my locale) unreadable Asian glyph (rsp. a "boxed char"), probably only Asians are able to type?This isn't limited to pictographic languages. For instance, look at wikipedia's current rules on transliterating Cyrillic:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(Cyrillic)Yes, transliteration into latin/ASCII depends on the authors locale! Sometimes it's simple (as with French accents: "é->e"), sometimes it's less simple (as with German umlauts: ß->ss, ä->ae), sometimes it's more complicated (as with Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arab, etc.), sometimes it's difficult (e.g. Asian).Other things to note from wikipedia are that they have multiple methods of transliterating from cyrillic within a language depending on the usage of the word and whether it currently has a common transliteration. I think this is just too complex an issue for us to say there is one logical and right way to transliterate a name and expect every other distro to use the same conventions. This needs to be done cross-distro at least, upstream if possible.I do not agree. We should not try to solve the world's problems. Instead we should (IMO can not avoid to) restrict ourselves to a smallest common denominator to keep Fedora going. Dimitry will not be able to type my last name (contains an é), I won't be able to type your name in its Japanese writing nor Dimitry's in his native Cyrillic spelling. This doesn't have any impact on our current lives, because transliterations/translations exist.
My objection is not based on unicode==good; it's based on not wanting to do at the distro level something that should be done for all packagers in all distros.
.. _[1]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions -Toshio
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