Re: 8bit characters in files in Debian packages
On Thu, 31 Mar 2011, Bill Allombert wrote:
> First this might force users to use UTF-8 locale. While this is the default, this is not
> mandatory in Debian. I know users that stays with ISO8859-1 because they have a lot of
> text files in that encoding.
>
> Until the C.UTF-8 proposal is implemented and mandated, a valid UTF-8 locale might not even
> exist on the system.
>
> Secondly, filenames inside .deb are not localizable, and it might prove
> problematic for users to deal with filenames in complex encoding. Case
> at end, I do not have Japanese font installed so I could not tell apart
> two filenames.
It's definitely problematic to deal with filenames using another encoding
than the currently configured one. But you don't have to deal "manually"
with non-ascii filenames provided by packages that often.
Filenames are not localizables like any gettext string, but there are
valid use cases where filenames might rightfully contain non-ascii
characters. How would you deal with a software where upstream has made a
choice implying some non-ASCII files if you were to forbid it in Debian
policy ?
The logical conclusion is that we should recommend to avoid non-ASCII
filenames but if it can't be avoided, then they should really be UTF-8
encoded so that it works nicely for the vast majority of users who
stick to the default configuration.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Follow my Debian News ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.com (English)
▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.fr (Français)
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