Bug#99933: Bug#174982: [PROPOSAL]: Debian changelogs should be UTF-8 encoded
On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 01:24:26PM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-01-03 at 11:45, Radovan Garabik wrote:
>
> > > #99933 goes a lot farther than #174982. First of all, we can't even
> > > suggest that people use UTF-8 in package control fields until all our
> > > tools support it. Right now it is just plain broken to put anything but
> > > ASCII in them.
> >
> > But people are putting ISO-8859-1 there, now and then.
>
> Yes, and it is fundamentally broken to do so, because our tools do not
> support it. Displaying it might happen to work on the maintainer's
> machine, but it will probably fail in many more places around the world,
> where people use terminals with a different native encoding type.
>
> > And I am going to use UTF-8 for Maintainer: in my packages, once
> > I have new stable mail address (and new UTF-8 GPG alias)
>
> Please only use ASCII until the tools support it, and file bugs against
> packages with control fields with characters not in ASCII. Otherwise
> you are just worsening the problem by adding yet another encoding to the
> mix of ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, and who knows what else is already there.
>
but unless someone starts actually _using_ UTF-8, we would never know
which tools are broken and which are not (I already found one bug
in handling of UTF-8 GPG alias - I'll file the bugreport after some more
testing).
And remember, this is debian *un*stable, so some breakage is to be
expected.
...
>
> I think a better approach is just for policy to be silent on the general
> encoding issue, set up a general Unicode infrastructure, start pushing
> UTF-8 where it is really needed (like filenames), and let the pressure
> build.
>
> Do you agree?
>
Yes.
> > If you manage to persuade relevant persons (Manoj?). Good luck :-)
>
> So far I haven't seen any objections...
>
But no sign of recognizing the urgent need of solving the problem either.
--
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| Radovan Garabík http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk |
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