Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 16:47 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 14:29 +0300, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> >> Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> >>>  * Ban unicode in package names (no draft submitted)
> >>>   * Not accepted
> >>>   
> >> Oops...
> >> The example of such an unicode name used is "écolier-fonts" .
> >>
> >> Then consider any user in non-latin1 locale. For example, my locale is 
> >> Russian. I have no "é" on my keyboard...
> > You are reiterating my mantra, which had been the reason for me to
> > propose banning unicode in package names.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, my FPC colleagues seem to be keen on shooting themselves
> > into their foot and to be keen on letting Fedora's usability to regress
> > further.
> > 
> >> Well, I can use cut and paste, when I have a mouse and the text is 
> >> already shown on my desktop.
> >> But what I have to do, when use just the cmdline interface? IOW, without 
> >> any GUI -- just the Linux console, or remote ssh session? How can I fill 
> >> the "é" character then?
> >>
> >> It seems that the only way to operate with such a filename is to use 
> >> shell wildcards: "rpm -qa \?colier-fonts"  etc.
> >>
> >> Does it mean, that the command line interface as well as any other 
> >> non-GUI core applications are now deprecated? ;)
> > 
> > Apparently that's what Fedora is heading to - Too many kids around, whio
> > have grown up with Win, I suppose.
> > 
> 
> You guys are blowing this way out of proportion,
I massively disagree, ... what you currently observe is negligible in
comparison to the flame that I expect you to experience when this would
hit the repos.

>  it would seriously help to 
> read the actual irc log. Also its too bad that it wasn't made clear in the 
> summary that this was not on the agenda, but only something discussed during 
> the free discussion phase at the end of the meeting.
It had been discussed in FPC before (When you had not been member: 2
weeks ago), it had been discussed in bugzilla (écollier-fonts review),
it had been discussed on the fedora-packaging list before (ca. 2 weeks
ago).

> AFAIK the whole FPC does not want to allow unicode names at the moment, but we 
> don't want to forbid them for now and ever on also, which is what the current 
> proposal basicly says.
>
> What would be good to have is a more balanced proposal which:
> 1) Explains that for now unicode filenames, and thus packagenames are forbidden
>     because we don't know if our infrastructure is ready
> 2) Lays out a plan (involving for example a test repo with unicode filenames,
>     and asking a few mirrors to try and sync to this in a _separate_ cronjob)
>     for making sure that our infrastructure gets fixed to handle this.
> 3) Calls for a revisit of this issue once the infra is ready.
>
> And then, when we reach step 3 (like with F-12), we can discuss all the 
> perceived usability issues, atm unicode package / filenames should simply not 
> be used!
I can only reiterate what I've said dozens of times before:
The technical issues are irrelevant, because they are solvable - The
usability issues matter.

Ralf