[Distutils] Proposal: Restrict the characters in a project name

[Eric V. Smith]

On May 15, 2013, at 3:29 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

> 
> On May 15, 2013, at 2:58 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Noah Kantrowitz <noah at coderanger.net> wrote:
>>> File me as a +1 for this change.  If we absolutely must support unicode package names, we should do the URLs in PyPI in punycode and have pip show a puny-mangled name in a confirmation prompt for anything with non-ascii characters in it. Yes, that does basically remove all reason to use unicode in package names, which is why I think blocking it is a much better idea. [a-zA-Z0-9_.-] is probably the right way to go.
>> 
>> Right, I'm also a fan of tightening up the rules for metadata 2.0 and
>> PyPI in general.
>> 
>> Fedora's package naming policy is limited to the characters Noah
>> suggests, with "+" also allowed:
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:NamingGuidelines#Common_Character_Set_for_Package_Naming
>> 
>> And Debian is also similar, with "+" allowed and "_" excluded:
>> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Source
>> 
>> Given the much higher security risks for distribution commands (over
>> identifiers in code), I think the conservative approach of following
>> Fedora & Debian's example is the right way to go here.
>> 
>> Anyone want to run a scan over the PyPI package set to see how many
>> packages would cause problems for a "[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]" only filter?
> 
> See my previous email where I did queries against my local DB. It's 225 total projects that wouldn't be allowed.

Can you send the list of those projects?

Eric.