Package: debian-policy Version: 3.6.1.0 Severity: wishlist Tags: patch This proposal aims to use UTF-8 encoding not only for debian/changelog, but also for debian/control. Patch attached, as well as plain text for better reading. Kind regards, Martin
--- debian-policy-3.6.1.0.orig/policy.sgml Tue Aug 19 14:32:23 2003
+++ debian-policy-3.6.1.0/policy.sgml Sun Aug 31 13:30:14 2003
@@ -2250,6 +2250,12 @@
See <ref id="substvars"> for details.
</p>
+ <p>
+ It is recommended that the control fields be encoded in
+ UTF-8 encoding, see <ref id="pkg-dpkgchangelog"> for
+ further information on this.
+ </p>
+
</sect>
<sect id="binarycontrolfiles">
5.2. Source package control files -- `debian/control'
-----------------------------------------------------
The `debian/control' file contains the most vital (and
version-independent) information about the source package and about
the binary packages it creates.
The first paragraph of the control file contains information about the
source package in general. The subsequent sets each describe a binary
package that the source tree builds.
The fields in the general paragraph (the first one, for the source
package) are:
* `Source' (mandatory)
* `Maintainer' (mandatory)
* `Section' (recommended)
* `Priority' (recommended)
* `Build-Depends' et al
* `Standards-Version' (recommended)
The fields in the binary package paragraphs are:
* `Package' (mandatory)
* `Architecture' (mandatory)
* `Section' (recommended)
* `Priority' (recommended)
* `Essential'
* `Depends' et al
* `Description' (mandatory)
The syntax and semantics of the fields are described below.
These fields are used by `dpkg-gencontrol' to generate control files
for binary packages (see below), by `dpkg-genchanges' to generate the
`.changes' file to accompany the upload, and by `dpkg-source' when it
creates the `.dsc' source control file as part of a source archive.
The fields here may contain variable references - their values will be
substituted by `dpkg-gencontrol', `dpkg-genchanges' or `dpkg-source'
when they generate output control files. See Section 4.9, `Variable
substitutions: `debian/substvars'' for details.
It is recommended that the control fields be encoded in UTF-8
encoding, see Section C.2.2, ``debian/changelog'' for further
information on this.
C.2.2. `debian/changelog'
-------------------------
See Section 4.4, `Debian changelog: `debian/changelog''.
It is recommended that the entire changelog be encoded in the UTF-8
(http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc2279.html) encoding of
Unicode (http://www.unicode.org/).[1]
[1] 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.
I think it is fairly obvious that we need to eventually transition to
UTF-8 for our package infrastructure; it is really the only sane
charset in an international environment. Now, we can't switch to
using UTF-8 for package control fields and the like until dpkg has
better support, but one thing we can start doing today is requesting
that Debian changelogs are UTF-8 encoded. At some point in time, we
can start requiring them to do so.
Checking for non-UTF8 characters in a changelog is trivial. Dump the
file through
iconv -f utf-8 -t ucs-4
discard the output, and check the return value. If there are any
characters in the stream which are invalid UTF-8 sequences, iconv will
exit with an error code; and this will be the case for the vast
majority of other character sets.
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