Bug#588661: lintian: spelling-error-in-binary false positive due to UTF-8 name

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

retitle 588661 spelling-error-in-binary misreports non-ASCII strings
severity 588661 minor
tags 588661 confirmed
thanks

Benjamin Drung <bdrung@ubuntu.com> writes:

> vlc 1.1.0-3 gets a spelling-error-in-binary ment meant information for
> the name Clément. This is a false positive.

This is indeed a problem, but I looked at it for a while and I'm not sure
that it's fixable.  The problem is that we generate the list of strings in
the binary using the program strings, which doesn't have a mode for
picking up UTF-8-encoded strings.  The options are either to only grab
ASCII or to grab any string of 8-bit characters that doesn't involve
control characters.  The latter, while doing the right thing here, would
produce a prohibitive volume of output that would need to be checked and
would end up making Lintian quite slow.

I'm lowering the severity of the bug to minor because this is why it's
marked as wild-guess, but leaving it open since it's definitely a bug.
I'll add a note to the tag description saying that this is a known
problem.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>