Bug#796170: lintian: [new check] warn on non-UTF8 text files

[Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org>]

* Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>, 2015-08-22, 18:04:
> > iconv should be good for plain text files in /usr/share/doc; but if 
> > applied blindly to code, or HTML documents or similar, it can cause 
> > more harm than good.
> "Blindly" can break when the code in question deals with obsolete 
> encodings, but otherwise, I disagree.

Python, Perl's POD, HTML and XML all have a way to declare encoding. If 
you apply iconv to a correctly-encoded file, but "forget" to update the 
encoding, you get mojibake, or in the Python's case, syntax error.

> I intend to submit a patch to debhelper that makes the whole process a 
> matter of writing a single value to a file under debian/ which would 
> massively reduce the amount of work in ~3000 affected packages.

Heaven forbid...

--
Jakub Wilk