Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:44:04 +0300, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:

> Alexander Boström wrote:
> > RPMs will probably always need names that everyone can type. That limits
> > it too Latin-1 (regardless of encoding) 
> 
> Please, note that "everyone" cannot type Latin1 .
> 
> There are enough countries in the World, where the Latin1 symbols are 
> not used at all. Moreover, they did not use ASCII in their culture 
> initially. ASCII came later, as a "symbols for the technical English", 
> because this language are used for computers for the historical reasons 
> (as well as the French is used in diplomacy).
> 
> IMHO the issue here is a lack of geography knowledge. Some people 
> ("kids" in terms of Ralf :) ) actually think that it is possible to 
> travell from US to Europe on a car... (without the ferry :) ). Hence it 
> is not too surprisingly that they think that all the people in the World 
> use latin1 ...

You presume too much. This latter paragraph should not have been posted.
Please stay on-topic.

I'd like to understand the goal/the purpose of permitting unusual
characters in RPM package file names and how it relates to i17n/l10n
and file names in general. I have the feeling that at first the door
for package names with multi-byte characters is opened, and as a next
step, file names in packages will use multi-byte characters, too. One
could also add non-English comments to spec files and source code
and justify it with the number of non-English Fedora contributors.