Re: Relaxing the restrictions for store item names

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On Tue, 22 Aug 2023 at 09:49, Eidvilas Markevičius 
<markeviciuseidvilas@gmail.com> wrote:

> Therefore, my proposal is to relax these limitations as much as
> possible (or at least somewhat) and to allow some more freedom when it
> comes to naming packages and other kinds of items in the store. We
> could, of course, still disallow all the main problematic characters,
> such as NUL, /, $, ~, space, newline and a few others, but other than
> that, I don't see any reason to forbid any of the remaining ones from
> being used.

Well, we could imagine to un-correlate package name and store path.
Other said, we could have a map from fancy characters to regular letter
already accepted as store path.

Hum, I have mixed feelings about fancy characters because they are often
painful to type.  For instance, I am French-speaking but using a UK
qwerty layout then cedilla (used in the words ça or façon or etc) is not
part of the layout so it’s painful to type because I have to rely on
another method than the usual typing.  Well, usually I type the regular
word using a regular c and then apply one spellchecker and I use Emacs
with ’C-x 8 RET cedilla’.  Even, when I am using XTerm or connected to
remote machine using plain TTY, I do not know how I could type a package
name with cedilla.

Another example is about Julia.  Some Julia packages support
mathematical Unicode notation or even emojis.  Typing them is painful
depending on your editor.  And rendering them can also be painful.  For
instance, how do you type ℝ?  Even when knowing LaTeX.

Well, I guess the proposal is about the support of non-latin alphabet.
My point is that some non-latin alphabets appears to me as exotic as
mathematical symbols when I have to type them.


Cheers,
simon