Bug#701081: debian-policy: mandate an encoding for filenames in binary packages

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Thanks for your comments.

On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 01:31:32PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
>  - There are here and there discussions raising possible corner cases
>    where distributing files with a name not representable in UTF-8 might
>    be justified, for instance in test suites.

Even though the general argument is correct, the particular example
probably applies to source packages in most cases. We don't control
source packages (unless we repack them), so I think they should not be
covered by a filename encoding policy.

>  - Similar discussion also took place in #99933.  I wonder about merging this
>    bug (#701081) and #99933.

I stumbled upon this bug before reporting this one and decided that the
issues were sufficiently separate from each other to warrant a new bug
number. I did not read the full bug log and therefore did not discover
that its scope widened to filenames as well. The discussion found
therein clearly is valuable. I still think that separating bugs for
filename encoding and file content encoding is a good idea, because
those issues can be solved independently. That said merging also makes
sense to point to the rest of the discussion. In the latter case, please
select a better summary message.

I have to admit, that I am slightly in favour of just copying Fedora's
approach. Making distributions more compatible with each other seems
like a worthwhile thing to do.

Helmut