Re: Relaxing the restrictions for store item names

[Kaelyn <kaelyn.alexi@protonmail.com>]

Hi,

On Tuesday, August 22nd, 2023 at 6:49 AM, Eidvilas Markevičius
<markeviciuseidvilas@gmail.com> wrote:

> Therefore, my proposal is to relax these limitations as much as
> possible (or at least somewhat) and to allow some more freedom when it
> comes to naming packages and other kinds of items in the store. We
> could, of course, still disallow all the main problematic characters,
> such as NUL, /, $, ~, space, newline and a few others, but other than
> that, I don't see any reason to forbid any of the remaining ones from
> being used.

While I don't really have an opinion on the matter aside from the biases
of growing up in the US, one non-trivial issue with Unicode store paths
and package names which hasn't been mentioned is that of Unicode
equivalence[1], particularly homographs[2]. For example U+0061 and U+0430
(the Latin and Cyrillic small letter "a", respectively) are often visually
identical but programmatically distinct. If not handled well, it could
lead to untypable package or store names by virtue of the user having to
guess which Unicode code point(s) is/are the correct one(s) for a certain
visual glyph.

Cheers,
Kaelyn

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack