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Bug#241333: policy mentions that changelogs should be utf-8; this is a bug



retitle 241333 require UTF-8 encoding in changelogs and control files
thanks

Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 04:09:51 -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 16:02:52 -0600 (CST), Adam Heath said:
>> > This is not supported by any tool in debian.

>> > Control files are ascii, 7-bit, period.  And, when generating the
>> > .changes for an upload, the changelog is included, this means the
>> > changelog *must* be 7-bit ascii.  Period.

> Please feel free to close this bug report, if there's any problem on
> dpkg when handling UTF-8, that should be considered a bug in dpkg.

> (Not closing myself as I'm neither the submitter, nor the maintainer).

Actually, at this point, I think it's time to upgrade the severity of
this in Policy.  Currently, we say:

     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]

(And we say it in an appendix, which is lame, but this is something that
we can fix as part of the restructuring that I'm hoping Manoj will write
up.  *grin*)

lintian has warned about non-UTF-8 changelog files for years, and at this
point there are only 95 packages left in the archive that don't have UTF-8
changelogs.  I see no reason not to upgrade this to a should, at the very
least, and I can see a strong argument for a must.

Comments?

Also, while we're looking at this, where are we on UTF-8 support in
debian/control?  Is it now time to similarly require that all control
files be encoded in UTF-8?  There are only 11 packages in the archive with
non-UTF-8 control files.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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