Bug#99933: Bug#174982: [PROPOSAL]: Debian changelogs should be UTF-8 encoded
On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 11:58, Denis Barbier wrote:
> 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.
Sure...but remember that my policy proposal does not drop support for
legacy charsets; in fact it recommends that programs try falling back to
them if UTF-8 decoding fails.
I see this policy proposal as a strong statement that Debian is moving
towards Unicode, not as a means to get packages which don't grok UTF-8
removed from Debian or something silly like that. Implicitly in this is
that we will support legacy encodings to some extent for a while.
Do you agree?
> I was unclear, and only speaking about files shipped by Debian packages
> which contain non-ASCII characters without specifying their encoding.
Ok.
> Users can do whatever they want with their data.
Agreed completely. They can have their data in any encoding they want,
as long as it's UTF-8. :)
(just kidding...)
> 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.
Ah, OK. I think that improving how our documentation formats specify
charsets is a great goal. I misunderstood your proposal.
> > 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?
Er...my patch was to support outputting UTF-8 to the user's terminal.
There was no input involved. I think you may have confused something
somewhere, but maybe I just wasn't clear about what it does...
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