KISS in Guidelines/Micro-Optimizations (was: Re: Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting)

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 09:59 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 13.03.2008 07:25, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> >>>>>>> "VS" == Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta at iki.fi> writes:
> >> VS> And by the way, in my opinion the discussion should not be only
> >> VS> about Unicode, but about restricting package names even to a
> >> VS> subset of ASCII (let's say eg.  a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, +, _, .).
> 
> FWIW, +1
> 
> >> This is why we need a concrete proposal to vote on.  Things would have
> >> gone much better if we had one.
> > +1
> > 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. 
> 
> Well, I see your point, but on the other hand: do we need to have
> details like those you outline in the guidelines?
In this case: Yes. 

Package names (And rpm-file-names) are a fundamental basis of packaging.

> Further: And does the FPC really need and want to solve details like
> this?
In this case: Yes. This problem is such kind of fundamental that it has
to be solved.

>  Trying to sort those out is of course a respectable goal, but it's
> not yet a big problem afaics.
Emphasize on NOT YET. 

The more people who are not aware about charset/encoding etc. issues
enter the scene, the more similar cases we will be facing.

It's only the fact such packages so far have not existed and the fact
people are now challenging this leak inside of the FPG, which had caused
this issue to pop up.

> So maybe it really just as simple as saying "ban packages with unicode
> names". or, to be more precise, make it something like: "Package names
> are limited to 'a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, +, _, .'
Exactly - It could be this kind of simple. 

Actually, I had expected this kind of solution to be obvious and
"natural" to everybody being involved, but ... apparently, I was wrong.

Ralf