On Thu, 2013-05-16 at 07:53 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote: > One of my major goals for metadata 2.0 is better packaging > interoperability with the Fedora and Debian ecosystems. Since those > formally restrict the set of permitted characters, and the existing > Python packaging ecosystem informally restricts it, it makes sense to > limit the character set formally. > > By the time metadata 3.0 comes around the question may be worth > revisiting, but arbitrary unicode distribution names are not going to > happen for this version. Supporting them would involve a truckload of > extra work in all the tools and I already expect to have to remove > features from the next draft in order to make it feasible to implement > in a timely fashion (Note: given that I'm not familiar with the > details of the distlib, pip or setuptools code bases, I figure a "this > is what I would like, now let's prune the low value hard to implement > parts" is a reasonable way to get feedback from the people that are > likely to end up actually implementing the changes).
For what it's worth, I think this is a wise decision. Tool support for Unicode filenames is sorely lacking and broken. For example, git on Mac OS X can't really cope with checkouts that include filenames with high-order characters; it treats such files as having been deleted after a checkout. I checked in a single file with an accented character in a project recently, and until I removed it, it accounted for about 20% of all bug reports from people who checked things about due to spotty tool support and environmental differences. - C _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
