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

[PJ Eby]

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 7:17 AM, Eric V. Smith <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
> It looks like space causes most of the issues. I'm not sure how
> "Twisted Flow >= 1.0" would be expected to parse.

You would spell it "Twisted-Flow>=1.0", at least for setuptools-based
tools.  Setuptools already restricts effective package name characters
to [a-z0-9.-], and limits the names in some other ways.  For example,
you can't have multiple dashes in a row.

Btw, I'm not sure that restricting the character set is actually going
to fix confusion problems.  Donald's "Djang-" example actually works
because the command line tools interpret the request as being for a
package called "Djang-", and if I understand correctly, you would
still be able to register a package named "Djang-" on PyPI.  I think
that tools will need to more explicitly address the issue of 8-bit
data in their input, e.g. by rejecting it.