Bug#174982: [PROPOSAL]: Debian changelogs should be UTF-8 encoded

[Tollef Fog Heen <tollef@add.no>]

* Colin Walters 

| Support for Unicode, and specifically UTF-8, is steadily increasing
| among popular applications in Debian.  For example, in unstable, GNOME 2
| has excellent support (almost level 2) in almost all its applications;
| the big remaining one is gnome-terminal, of which one requires
| development versions in order to support UTF-8 (available in Debian
| experimental now if you want to play).  I think that by the time sarge
| is released, UTF-8 support will start to hit critical mass.

An extra point is that with RH 8.0, RH has switched to UTF8 as their
default encoding.  This will cause upstream support to get a lot
better, I suspect.

| Right now, people are putting whatever random characters they feel like
| in Debian changelogs; they might be encoded in ISO-8859-1, BIG5,
| ISO-8859-2, ISO-2022-JP, or who knows what.  This does come up in the
| real world; I use apt-listchanges, and I fairly often see broken
| characters in changelogs.  The solution is to define the charset of
| changelogs as UTF-8.  That way, I can read all the changelogs at once
| (currently using gnome-terminal) and it will work.

I think we shouldn't use must just yet, since this will cause a lot of
packages (you know how many?) to be instantly buggy.  If you change
the «must» to «should», I'll second the proposal.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-