Bug#701081: debian-policy: mandate an encoding for filenames in binary packages
On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 03:28:30PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Bill Allombert <Bill.Allombert@math.u-bordeaux1.fr> writes:
> > On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 03:13:04PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> >> Many were posted to this thread. I guess I just disagree with you on
> >> whether those uses are "good." For me, allowing the correct spellings
> >> of words and the correct names of things to be represented in file
> >> names is important enough to rise to an ethical goal that I would
> >> advocate adopting. A pure ASCII stance feels like a very
> >> English-centric stance.
>
> > Filename are not translatable, so a better mechanism is needed anyway.
>
> This discussion isn't about translations, and I don't agree that they're
> relevant to this decision.
Precisely, the situation is very different. Instead of displaying text in the
user prefered language and scripts, UTF-8 filenames will be in an arbitrary
scripts which might not be well supported on the user terminal both for output
and input (which might miss support for the correct fonts, left-to-right
support, ligature, input methods etc.), and that the user might not know how to
spell.
And that assuming the user use UTF-8 locale (so the C locale does not qualify).
By contrast ASCII 7-bit is well supported by all Debian systems and is generally
sufficient to carry the small quantity of information needed by filenames,
and in any case ASCII 7-bit is the current standard practice for filenames so users
are used to them.
I am concerned that UTF-8 filenames in binary packages might hamper the ability
of the user/sysadmin to query and troubleshout their system, because the name
are not readable, cannot be typed in and cannot be googled easily.
Dealing with a system where ls -R /usr/share/foo report
%ls -R /usr/share/foo/
/usr/share/foo/:
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/usr/share/foo/???????/:
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is likely to be painful.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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