Re: Relaxing the restrictions for store item names

[Eidvilas Markevičius]

Although now, just a few hours later, I'm having second thoughts on
this. When you really think about it, it's very unlinkely that some
user would prefer typing something like

guix install 
%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8-%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC

over

guix install имагинари-програм

even if they don't have the russian (or whatever other language)
keyboard layout set up on their system, so just for accessability
purposes, the solution wouldn't be all that great. It would also make
store name unnecessarily long (they're already long as is), and
there's a 255 char limit for filenames that we have to keep in mind as
well. Searching the store using standard utilities such as find and
grep would too, as a consequence, break... There's just too many
problems with this.

I believe what Julien proposed is the most reasonable solution:
unrestrict unicode characters in the store and (maybe) make it a
project policy to not put unicode characters inside package names
(however, personally I wouldn't be against that either).

Now ensuring that URIs don't break, especially for substitute
provision, should also be taken into consideration, but this can be
handled separately.

On Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 12:14 PM Eidvilas Markevičius
<markeviciuseidvilas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 11:37 AM Nathan Dehnel <ncdehnel@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > What you could do is implement percent encoding:
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding
> > -Allows you to store package titles in any language in an encoded form
> > -Allows the titles to be typed on latin keyboards
> > -Allows the packages to be accessed through URIs in the future without
> > causing problems
>
> Now that's an idea. I didn't really thought of that. Although it'd
> probably be trickier to implement in order to make all the tooling
> compatible. I think that might be a good solution nonetheless.