Bug#174982: [PROPOSAL]: Debian changelogs should be UTF-8 encoded

[Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp>]

> | Right now, people are putting whatever random characters they feel like
> | in Debian changelogs; they might be encoded in ISO-8859-1, BIG5,
> | ISO-8859-2, ISO-2022-JP, or who knows what.  This does come up in the
> | real world; I use apt-listchanges, and I fairly often see broken
> | characters in changelogs.  The solution is to define the charset of
> | changelogs as UTF-8.  That way, I can read all the changelogs at once
> | (currently using gnome-terminal) and it will work.
> 
> I think we shouldn't use must just yet, since this will cause a lot of
> packages (you know how many?) to be instantly buggy.  If you change
> the «must» to «should», I'll second the proposal.

Erm.. no, only those packages which comply with the latest 
version of policy, and it is pretty easy to add a  rule to 
change the encoding to utf-8 on the debian/rules install target.

Adding an example would be handy:

  To install changelog from upstream that is coded in ISO-8859-15, 
  the following rules in your debian/rules may help:


clean:
	.
	rm -f debian/ChangeLog-upstream
	.
	.

binary:
	.
	.
	.
  iconv -f iso-8859-15 -t utf-8 < ChangeLog > debian/ChangeLog-upstream
  dh_installchanges debian/ChangeLog-upstream
	.
	.




It may help if debhelper dh_installchangelog had a 
charset conversion option, maybe.



regards,
	junichi