Re: Bug#208011: [PROPOSAL] UTF-8 encoding for debian/control
On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 11:03:48PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Sep 2003 23:29:38 +0200, Denis Barbier <barbier@linuxfr.org> said:
>
>
> > Anyway I fail to see which problems arise with this proposal, could
> > someone enlighten me?
>
>
> This has been brought up before. The control fields should not
> contain charsets that can't yet be handled by the packaging tools;
> policy should follow, not lead, the tools and design, for the most
> part. Policy is not the place to try out design; it is supposed to
> document mature practices, and information about practices required
> for package integration.
You wrote in #127809 about the 'Enhances' field:
] Policy mentions enhances as a means of declaring a dependency
] relationship. It does not say that it shall be paid any attention to
] by dpkg, apt, and friends.
We are requesting that when 8-bit characters are used, they should be
UTF-8 encoded. We do not say that dpkg, apt, and friends have to
recode these characters when processing these data.
] In time, support for this field shall come in the tools. In
] the meanwhile, the field functions well enough to let humans know
] that some package enhances the functionality of some other package. I
] fail to see how that can be considered negative.
Hey, you were on crack? Repeat after me:
POLICY IS NOT THE PLACE TO TRY OUT DESIGN
Anyway same here, packaging tools will handle UTF-8 encoded fields
later. But having non UTF-8 data will make this support harder,
because tools will have to deal with invalid multi-byte sequences.
Denis
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