Bug#99933: Bug#174982: [PROPOSAL]: Debian changelogs should be UTF-8 encoded
On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 10:23:14AM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
[...]
> It looks to me like at this point almost everyone agrees with the
> content of my proposal in #99933, and we are discussing implementation
> details. Agreed?
No. We agree that UTF-8 support must be dramatically improved, but
legacy encodings must be supported too.
[...]
> You mean like changelog.txt.UTF-8 or changelog.UTF-8.txt ? I am pretty
> much opposed to any sort of proposal of this form. The reason is that
> changing programs to recognize our arbitrary scheme for file encodings
> will not only be a lot of work,
I was unclear, and only speaking about files shipped by Debian packages
which contain non-ASCII characters without specifying their encoding.
Users can do whatever they want with their data.
I have almost txt, man and info pages in mind. IIRC *BSD put man pages
under .../man/<language>.<encoding>/, don't they? Info pages are never
translated. The only text files with non-ASCII letters I encounter
are documentation and can be safely renamed, but maybe there are others.
> but instead we could add support to programs to autodetect the charset
> semi-intelligently from file content, which is what programs like Emacs
> in the real world do today.
Then why do you patch dpkg to support UTF-8 input if it can guess encoding?
Denis
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