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Re: charsets in debian/control



* Petter Reinholdtsen (pere@hungry.com) [041205 11:30]:
> [Peter Samuelson]
> > We seem to be moving to a de facto standard of UTF-8 for non-ASCII
> > characters in debian/control files.  This is not specified in Policy
> > [1], but for hopefully obvious reasons, consistency is a Good Thing,
> > and UTF-8 seems to be the best solution for this sort of thing.

> Some will argue that only ASCII is acceptable in debian/control files.
> I am not one of these.
> 
> I agree that we should standardise on UTF-8 for both the changelog and
> the control file (and the copyright file, for the upstream author and
> package author names).  We need to be able to correctly represent the
> names of people, and it can not be done using ASCII only.
> 
> Good to see that most packages already uses UTF-8.  I hope the
> packages using other charsets can be converted to UTF-8 as soon as
> possible.

There are different way to view that, and there is a policy bug about
that very topic.

I think most of us agree that non-UTF-8-characters are not a good idea
(please note the UTF-8-characters is a superset of ASCII).  For some
places (like package names), I think most of us even agree that only
ASCII-characters should be used. Also, there is the proposal that in
other fields (i.e. names), an translation should (also) be used if the
characters are not in some basic classes (more or less: ASCII plus
ASCII-similar letters).

So, I personally consider non-UTF-8-characters an bug, and
UTF-8-not-ASCII on the way from bug to allowed.



Cheers,
Andi
-- 
   http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/
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