Bug#293859: installation-report

[Frans Pop <aragorn@tiscali.nl>]

On Saturday 12 February 2005 00:22, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Colin Watson caught up with this bug on IRC the other night.  It's
> caused by something in the stack not coping well with the
> text-with-accents that os-prober picks up on systems running XP French.
> The hypothesis was that cdebconf couldn't handle non-UTF8 text; if
> that's the case, then either the input needs to be sanitized when
> subbed into the db, or cdebconf needs to be more forgiving of non-UTF8
> input.

I've tested this within d-i using three testcases:
1. Microsoft Windows XP Homé Edition (ISO-8895-1 encoded)
2. Microsoft Windows XP Homé Edition (UTF-8 encoded)
3. (Microsoft) Windows/XP - Home_Edition 89&90

The 3rd case was chosen to test if any of the characters in it would cause 
problems.

1: causes the hang described in the bug report
2: is accepted fine by d-i and displayed correctly
3: works fine for both d-i and grub

Although UTF-8 encoding seems to work for d-i, I've chosen to sanitize the 
input as:
- we don't really know what encodings boot.ini could be in, so we don't
  really know what we should convert _from_ if we wanted to convert the
  input to UTF-8;
- I have no idea what grub would make of UTF-8 encoding.

I've committed a patch to os-prober that will make d-i fall back to a 
default description if the one in boot.ini contains any other characters 
than "a-zA-Z0-9 &()/_-" (chosen somewhat arbitrarily).
I've tested that this rejects both 1. and 2. and allows 3.

Cheers,
FJP