Bug#241333: Proposed release goal: UTF-8 for changelog and control

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

In looking at some long-standing Policy bugs, I see that Policy currently
doesn't specify a character set for debian/control and only recommends
UTF-8 for debian/changelog in an appendix.  I think that it's time to
simply require UTF-8 for changelog and control files, and I think the
interoperability of using the same character set so that all parsers can
assume the same meaning warrants making this RC.

I want to get the sign-off of the release team before making it a must in
Policy, however.

lintian.debian.org says:

debian-changelog-file-uses-obsolete-national-encoding (95 packages, 95 tags)
debian-control-file-uses-obsolete-national-encoding (11 packages, 11 tags)

so a mass bug filing would be in order here.  If this seems like a
reasonable goal, I'll raise the mass bug filing on debian-devel for more
general approval.

Policy bugs:

http://bugs.debian.org/143941
http://bugs.debian.org/208011
http://bugs.debian.org/241333
http://bugs.debian.org/246016

(There are also other bugs concerning UTF-8, in particular 99324 and
99933, that have a broader scope and concern all files and filenames in
the package.  Those I don't think we're ready to deal with yet.)

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