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

[Julian Gilbey <jdg@debian.org>]

On Sat, Apr 06, 2013 at 08:20:15PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Here is a somewhat clumsy proposition.
> 
>       <sec id="filenames">
>         <heading>File names</heading>
> 
>         <p>
>           The name of the files installed by binary packages in the system PATH 
>           (namely <tt>/bin</tt>, <tt>/sbin</tt>, <tt>/usr/bin</tt>,
>           <tt>/usr/sbin</tt> and <tt>/usr/games/</tt>) must be encoded in
>           ASCII.
>         </p>

For consistency, I guess this should be /usr/games rather than
/usr/games/.

>         <p>
>           The name of the files and directories installed by binary packages
>           outside the system PATH must be encoded in UTF-8 and should be
>           restricted to ASCII when they can be represented in that character
>           set.
>         </p>
>       </sec>
> 
> 
> What do you think ?

That sounds a very reasonable proposal.

The final paragraph seems a little bit vague; would "should be
restricted to ASCII when it is possible to do so" be clearer?  For if
Unicode characters can be represented in ASCII, they almost always
would be.  This alternative wording would suggest that using
characters such as em-dashes or non-breaking spaces or the like is not
good (though I doubt people would use them as filenames of packaged
files!).

   Julian