fedora release name problem

Peter Robinson pbrobinson at gmail.com
Tue Mar 19 12:51:32 UTC 2013


On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Kai Engert <kaie at kuix.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-03-18 at 23:56 +0000, Sérgio Basto wrote:
>> Could we consider change release name from "Schrödinger's Cat" to
>> "Schrodingers Cat" or other name that not have this additional
>> problem ?
>
> In my opinion, it makes sense to distinguish between code and content.
>
> When compared with 10-15 years ago, it's my perception that most
> applications that nowadays process user visible content are able to deal
> with international characters. This is a great advancement.
>
> However, code is usually limited to ASCII. We cannot use Umlauts in
> variable names in most programming languages. It's no surprise to me
> that many programmer tools have similar limitation.
>
> The Fedora release name is part of the code, and also used by programmer
> or administrative tools to process it. What we are facing here is the
> question: "Are we ready to introduce non-ASCII characters into the code
> and tool level?".
>
> It seems like the answer is "not yet".

Which is a bug that needs to be fixed, it could even be a security bug
(but you'd need to be root and would have other problems). The Fedora
Release name is not part of the code how ever you try and spin it.

Ultimately there's no point putting a whole lot of points across. It
comes down to two things:
1) FESCo deciding how they want to deal with it (I suggest changing it
to ascii for alpha, and back straight after to ensure it has lots of
testing up to beta)
2) when and how quickly the bug can be fixed.

The code is used by lots of other orgs all over the world, it needs to
be robust.

Peter


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