Debconf 1.2.0 has experimental support for encoded character sets. We will try to use UTF-8 encoding for everything in the templates files shipped with packages, but if that should not prove to be practical for some languages, it supports other encodings as well. The encoding is included in the field name, so you get a field name such as "Description-de_DE.UTF-8". If you are using a different character set, debconf will use Text::Iconv to convert UTF-8 to your preferred encoding. For this to work, libtext-iconv-perl must be installed; debconf merely suggests it. Of course there is no change in behavior for the old Description-de type fields that lack any encoding information. This is exactly as broken as it has always been. :-) There is not yet any utility to generate merged templates files with encoding information in the format I chose to use. po-debconf will hopefully do so soon, and should allow translators to use non-UTF8 charsets in their .po files, and convert to UTF-8 when building the package. Any package that includes the new fields needs to depend on deconf (>= 1.2.0). There will eventually be a debconf-2 virtual package that things can depend on instead, and it is probably premature to convert over to UTF-8 templates files in released packages at this time. It needs a lot of testing, I've had only one tester, who reports it is somehow broken for extended descriptions and nl_NL.UTF-8 using the readline frontend. -- see shy jo
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