Problems with UTF-8 in changelog

[frank@kuesterei.ch (Frank Küster)]

Hi,

I am trying to have my debian/changelog file in utf-8, as required by
standards-version 3.6.0. However, dpkg-parsechangelog seems not to bee
able to parse that:

frank@alhambra:~/src/Packages/netenv/netenv-0.94.2$ iconv -f utf-8 -t ucs-4 <debian/changelog >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo yes
frank@alhambra:~/src/Packages/netenv/netenv-0.94.2$

i.e. the changelog is still not in utf-8

frank@alhambra:~/src/Packages/netenv/netenv-0.94.2$ dpkg-parsechangelog | grep ^Maint
Maintainer: Frank Küster <frank@alhambra.bioz.unibas.ch>

This is o.k. Now saved the file in utf-8 (with GNU Emacs 21.3)

frank@alhambra:~/src/Packages/netenv/netenv-0.94.2$ iconv -f utf-8 -t ucs-4 <debian/changelog >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo yes
yes

So it seems it's correct, in utf-8

frank@alhambra:~/src/Packages/netenv/netenv-0.94.2$ dpkg-parsechangelog | grep ^Maint
Maintainer: Frank KÃŒster <frank@alhambra.bioz.unibas.ch>
frank@alhambra:~/src/Packages/netenv/netenv-0.94.2$ dpkg -l dpkg-dev
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                  Version               Description
+++-=====================-=====================-==========================================================
ii  dpkg-dev              1.10.10               Package building tools for Debian
frank@alhambra:~/src/Packages/netenv/netenv-0.94.2$ 

I also tried 

LC_ALL=$somelocale dpkg-parsechangelog

with somelocale in C, de_DE.UTF-8, de_DE.ISO-8859-15@euro (these are
existing on my system), but that doesn't change anything.

Am I doing something wrong?

Bye, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie