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Re: 8bit characters in files in Debian packages



On Fri, Apr 01, 2011 at 09:02:49AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> 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 ?

This issue has yet to come up, and we would have the same issue if upstream
has chosen to use a non UTF-8 encoding.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here. 


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