Customize emoji aliases

[muzzsh]

Feature Description

By now, there is no way to customize emoji alias(es) without rebuilding the gitea server since the predefined emoji aliases are hard coded.

This would be a problem when migrating from other VCS providers.
Here is an example, the ladybug couldn't be rendered properly because, in gitea, this emoji was called "lady_beetle" instead of "beetle" in bitbucket.org:

Can we add a configure section in the app.ini which is describing custom emoji aliases defined by the users(administrators)? Something like:

[ui.emoji_aliases]
beetle = lady_beetle
my_thumb = thumbsup
... ...

Screenshots

[muzzsh]

A patch is ready to review #22156

[mrsdizzie]

The real cause of this bug is that the emoji data used has not been updated from the upstream source. The alias beetle is a Unicode version 13 addition but Gitea still use Unicode version 12:

gitea/build/generate-emoji.go

Lines 27 to 28 in 32e8634

	gemojiURL = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/github/gemoji/master/db/emoji.json"
	maxUnicodeVersion = 12

I haven't tried, but assuming it still works just changing that to 13 (or higher) and running the build script should update Gitea emoji data to match what others are using. I believe it was set to 12 initially because 13 was new enough that anybody who hadn't updated their font or os would see missing emoji symbol for anything newer than 12 which showed up in the suggestions.

You can see the 'beetle' / 'lady_beetle' alias change here:

github/gemoji#173

I think that should be the proper fix for this issue since most other sources aren't using custom aliases that differ from Gitea but the ones Gitea have are just out of date from upstream that others are using too.

[muzzsh]

The real cause of this bug is that the emoji data used has not been updated from the upstream source. The alias lady_beetle is a Unicode version 13 addition but Gitea still use Unicode version 12:

gitea/build/generate-emoji.go

Lines 27 to 28 in 32e8634

	gemojiURL = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/github/gemoji/master/db/emoji.json"
	maxUnicodeVersion = 12

I haven't tried, but assuming it still works just changing that to 13 (or higher) and running the build script should update Gitea emoji data to match what others are using. I believe it was set to 12 initially because 13 was new enough that anybody who hadn't updated their font or os would see missing emoji symbol for anything newer than 12 which showed up in the suggestions.

You can see the 'lady_beetle' alias change here:

github/gemoji#173

I think that should be the proper fix for this issue since most other sources aren't using custom aliases that differ from Gitea but the ones Gitea have are just out of date from upstream that others are using too.

It's really good to know how this issue was actually caused, and it's fairly well to fix this issue by updating the Unicode version from the upstream.

My concern is, Unicode version 13 was published on Mar.10th, 2020, nearly 3 years ago, but we still have the problem now.

Can we add the customizable emoji alias feature for the administrators as a workaround in case some changes are to be made by the upstream, but gitea doesn't catch up?

[muzzsh]

Plus, as the "Emoji Meaning" mentioned:

Not to be confused with 🐞 Lady Beetle, 🪳 Cockroach, 🐛 Bug, 🐜 Ant or other emoji representations of insects. https://emojipedia.org/beetle/

"beetle" and "lady_beetle" are two different emojis, but in the case shown in the screenshot I posted earlier, the bitbucket.org emoji collection seems confused about "beetle" and "lady_beetle". It's not a problem at all in most scenarios (if Gitea supports ”beetle“ as a valid emoji either way), but when migrating from bitbucket.org (what I'm doing), it would be nicer if I could keep consistency because tons of historical commit messages are using the confused "beetle".

[mrsdizzie]

My concern is, Unicode version 13 was published on Mar.10th, 2020, nearly 3 years ago, but we still have the problem now.

Agreed. It was never updated because there is no type of reminder system to do so once a year and this is probably the first reported issue to be seen as a result. I added the original set so that is probably my fault sorry!

Can we add the customizable emoji alias feature for the administrators as a workaround in case some changes are to be made by the upstream, but gitea doesn't catch up?

Gitea should catch up and I think it would fix most issues. I added a PR to update the emoji data set for all of Gitea #22342. Maybe since it involves no code change it could be back ported and get to users sooner than a new configuration option would be able to.

If another configuration option exists it should have its own good use case and not be needed only as a workaround for the general emoji dataset being out dated for a few years.

I'm not voting against any new option or trying to replace the original PR, just using this issue to highlight that the emoji data has gotten out of sync / date with upstream. If the PR is still helpful afterwards then great.

I commented in the PR above it is pretty easy to update the dataset when a new unicode version is supported upstream (which is shared with Github and many other places). It should probably be updated once per year whenever upstream adds new unicode versions.