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

[Chris McDonough]

On Thu, 2013-05-16 at 07:53 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> One of my major goals for metadata 2.0 is better packaging
> interoperability with the Fedora and Debian ecosystems. Since those
> formally restrict the set of permitted characters, and the existing
> Python packaging ecosystem informally restricts it, it makes sense to
> limit the character set formally.
> 
> By the time metadata 3.0 comes around the question may be worth
> revisiting, but arbitrary unicode distribution names are not going to
> happen for this version. Supporting them would involve a truckload of
> extra work in all the tools and I already expect to have to remove
> features from the next draft in order to make it feasible to implement
> in a timely fashion (Note: given that I'm not familiar with the
> details of the distlib, pip or setuptools code bases, I figure a "this
> is what I would like, now let's prune the low value hard to implement
> parts" is a reasonable way to get feedback from the people that are
> likely to end up actually implementing the changes).

For what it's worth, I think this is a wise decision.  Tool support for
Unicode filenames is sorely lacking and broken.  For example, git on Mac
OS X can't really cope with checkouts that include filenames with
high-order characters; it treats such files as having been deleted after
a checkout.  I checked in a single file with an accented character in a
project recently, and until I removed it, it accounted for about 20% of
all bug reports from people who checked things about due to spotty tool
support and environmental differences.

- C