Bug#701081: debian-policy: mandate an encoding for filenames in binary packages
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 12:43:28PM +0100, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> Package: debian-policy
> Severity: wishlist
>
> Apparently the debian-policy currently says nothing about the characters
> used in filenames contained in binary packages. Most packages use common
> sense and only use a small subset of US-ASCII. In Debian sid main most
> filenames can be represented using the following subset of US-ASCII
> characters (written as a regular expression):
>
> [][a-zA-Z0-9{}<>() ^/,=:&!*%#$~@+._-]
>
> The number of exceptions is about 200 contained in about 50 binary
> packages. In those packages some filenames are not representable as
> UTF-8 (for example aspell-is) and others don't make any sense in
> ISO-8859-15 (for example ca-certificates).
>
> It would be nice if some common ground concerning filename encoding
> could be reached. The options range from a rather restrictive definition
> of acceptable characters via requiring filenames to be representable in
> US-ASCII to mandating a particular encoding (such as UTF-8). This could
> be first introduced as a SHOULD and later turned into a MUST.
>
> Personally I do not really care about what the precise restriction is as
> long as it permits a mechanical transformation to unicode.
I raised a similar issue in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2011/03/msg00212.html
In most case, 8bit chars in filename are bugs.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
Reply to: