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

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 1:12 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> It also has a problem with setuptools, distribute, and PyPI and the way they do normalization. They all already assume that projects will generally have alpha numeric names and you can take any non alpha numeric string of characters and replace it with a "-". So in order to properly support unicode you'd have to remove all the existing versions of setuptools from production use, and you'd need to update PyPI to understand how to lower case unicode.
>
> Because I registered The snowman package, you'll find it's impossible to register any other pure unicode package of any length.

If PyPI has a proper i18n and Unicode implementation first, and then
the tools are updated (perhaps distlib is an easier place to add
Unicode than setuptools), then pypi will contain:

1. mostly ASCII projects that everyone can install

2. some Unicode projects uploaded by jerks

3. some worthwhile Unicode-named projects that might not have been
uploaded before

4. some Unicode-named packages that you have to use even though you
don't like the name?

It's true that for a long time ASCII project names will be more
convenient no matter what PyPI does, but it can be the publisher's
choice rather than being cut off at the head. I don't think it's a
tremendous amount of work to make Unicode work properly just for those
who want it.