Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Ralf Corsepius]

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.

> >>   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.
> > 
> 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. 
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.

Ralf