Re: Bug#208011: [PROPOSAL] UTF-8 encoding for debian/control
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Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 31, 2003 at 04:59:43PM +0200, Denis Barbier wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 31, 2003 at 02:20:06PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
>>> On Sun, Aug 31, 2003 at 01:35:36PM +0200, Martin Godisch wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>> Objection. Not until it is supported by the relevant tools. There are
>>> a number of bugs open on dpkg itself about this, without even
>>> considering the higher-level tools.
>> Some control files contain non-ASCII characters, there is no reason not to
>> mandate UTF-8 instead of random encodings.
> It will display incorrectly on the vast majority of workstations. Few
> people are using UTF-8 terminals.
I won't contradict you, but almost the same thing applies to
debian/changelog (dpkg-parsechangelog), nevertheless it is UTF-8
encoded. I think it might be a good idea to force the same encoding for
the Maintainer-field in debian/control and the line listing the
maintainer in debian/changelog.
I would discourage to actually use non-ascii values in other fields of
debian/control (especially the description), because the frontends afaik
would not handle it properly.
cu andreas
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