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Re: Status of UTF-8 Debian changelogs



On Thu, 2003-06-05 at 08:23, Josip Rodin wrote:

> Ahm. You need it written in the Policy manual to use a 16-bit charset?

As Steve points out, the size of the code space isn't particularly
relevant.

> I don't see all those (7|8)-bit-charset-using people requiring the same...

The problem is that we have no way to know what encoding an individual
Debian Changelog entry is in.  This is actually important for stuff like
apt-listchanges.  I constantly see broken characters in Debian
changelogs in apt-listchanges from people using ISO-8859-1, when my
terminal speaks UTF-8 natively.  If you're using an ISO-8859-1 terminal,
then apt-listchanges could recode the changelogs from UTF-8 to
ISO-8859-1 (or try, anyways).  And since my terminal speaks UTF-8,
apt-listchanges could just pass it on asis.

A situation where it can just be any encoding (or even a mix, if say a
speaker of an ISO-8859-2 language later takes over from the previous
ISO-8859-1 maintainer) is just terribly tbroken.

UTF-8 is the one and only sane choice.  This policy amendment got a
number of seconds, so unless you can raise a coherent objection, I think
it should go in.




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