At Wed, 31 Jul 2013 14:17:18 -0400, Tony Garnock-Jones wrote: > On 07/31/2013 02:11 PM, Jay McCarthy wrote: > > The restriction is primarily because they appear in URLs as single > > path segments. > > Could we then widen the restriction to be [-A-Za-z0-9._~!$&'()*+,;=], > following http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.3 (but > disallowing percent-escaping)?
Package names show up in all sorts of other contexts, too, such as filesystem paths. In all cases, there is some encoding that would work, but it's a pain and a source of subtle bugs. Note that the programming language in which we'd have to deal with encoding is sometimes not nearly as nice as Racket. For example, including a package with "$" in its name as part of a `PKGS=...' argument to `make' is going to fail in lots of ways (since the `PKGS' value flows back and worth between `make' and `sh' or `cmd.exe'). Finally, there's the question of inference that `raco pkg install' and other tools perform on a string that represents a package source. Keeping the package-name grammar simple makes that inference more predictable. > I ask because I find the occasional package whose git repo is named > "foobar.rkt/", and it's inconvenient to have to (a) make up and (b) > remember a package name different from "foobar.rkt" for that case. I see what you mean, and yet "foobar.rkt" seems like a strange name for a Racket package. In particular, I'd expect it to be inferred as a filename source, instead of a package-name source, if we ever manage to make individual files act as packages (as some have suggested). _________________________ Racket Developers list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/dev
