Bug#246016: Define allowed charsets properly
On Mon, 26 Apr 2004 22:23:11 +0200, Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org> said:
> Package: debian-policy Severity: wishlist
> Hi,
> this mail trys to summarize the recent discussion about charsets
> (especially utf-8), and which we accept where, starting with
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2004/debian-policy-200404/msg00016.html
> It replaces (at least) the following bugs:
>> 99324: Default charset should be UTF-8 142164: Packages files
>> should be in UTF-8 208011: [PROPOSAL] UTF-8 encoding for
>> debian/control 241333: policy mentions that changelogs should be
>> utf-8; this is a bug
> If you feel that this summarization has errors, please don't
> hesitate to correct me. If there are no corrections (or we agree on
> the changes), I'll send a proposal to policy to this bug in the next
> weeks.
Umm. Have you gotten the dpkg, apt. aptitude folks to ssign
off on this? Because, if not, it is premature to start laying down
policy for it. Indeed, I would expect the tools to start supporting
it first, and then make sure that partial upgrades from stable are
still possible using a stable dpkg/apt and unstable package.
> We also agreed that field-names (like "Package:") must consist of
> ASCII; I would try to be even stronger on this and say:
> "A-Za-z0-9\-\+" are the only allowed characters for a field-name.
Umm. Why are you redefining what policy already says about
package names?
> We also agreed that we won't accept non-ASCII for non-descriptive
> fields, e.g. Package Name, Dependencies, Version, ...
> We had some discussion whether we allow some or all characters for
> some descriptive fields, i.e. Maintainer, Uploaders, Package
> description, changelog and other required or standard documents
> (copyright, README.Debian, ...). At the end, nobody really vetoed
> against allowing all utf-8-characters there, but requiring a
> transcription for characters that are not in "Basic Latin", "Latin-1
> supplement" and "Latin Extended-A". (Jeroens proposal)
> However, allowing these characters doesn't change the need for all
> documents to be english (except, of course, the localized *.po
> files).
This sounds to be too undefined yet to be a formal proposal,
imho. Cann we see a repository where packages so modified live? Can
they be accessed by a user running aStabel (Sarge)?
manoj
--
When stupidity is a sufficient explanation, there is no need to have
any recourse to any other. -- Michael Uhlmann
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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