Re: Proposed release goal: UTF-8 support
On 2013-10-01 00:54, Adam Borowski wrote:
> Hi!
>
> As previously (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/08/msg00217.html)
> discussed, I'd like to propose improving support for UTF-8. All material
> shipped with Debian should be encoded this way, or, for media with an opaque
> format, as something capable of storing any Unicode character, without need
> for any extra steps.
>
Hi,
Thanks for your interest in improving Debian Jessie. I appreciate the
idea behind this goal, but I have a few concerns with some of the sub-goals.
> There are four sub-goals:
>
> * user-accessible interfaces (GUI, stdin, stdout, stderr, command line,
> reading/writing plain-text files) should be able to pass through UTF-8
> data uncorrupted, by default
Do we have a number of GUIs/tools that needs update here? If not, I am
affraid this fails the "Measurable" requirement. Even then, I doubt it
is realistic to assume there will be time to test all interfaces, so
perhaps put a limit on for Jessie (e.g. "All interfaces of/in
$classification")
> * UTF-8 should be properly displayed
Can you be a bit more specific here? Is this still for "usre-accessible
interfaces", then my concerns from above also apply here.
> * all filenames in Debian packages, binary and source, must use UTF-8
> (obviously, 7-bit ASCII satisfies this requirement)
Okay, thanks to the Lintian check, I think we can say this satisfies the
SMART requirements at least for binary packages (the check is not done
on source packages as I recall)[1].
> * all text files shipped by Debian should be encoded in UTF-8
>
I suspect this is suffering from the same problems as the
"user-accessible interface". Though I suspect most of the problematic
files should be easier to detect then a bug in a user-interface (and
re-encoding is probably easier than fixing bugs in user-interfaces).
For this particular sub-goal, it is also possible to reduce the scope by
file type (e.g. "For Jessie, we will fix all POD,$A,... and $N files").
> The wiki entry: https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/utf-8
>
By the way, this link does not appear to be included on
https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals.
Once again, I like the idea behind the goal. However, I would like to
see some numbers of how much work there is (or how much work we/you
decide to target for Jessie) to ensure this goal is Attainable.
~Niels
[1] http://lintian.debian.org/tags/file-name-is-not-valid-UTF-8.html
Lists 5 packages and 15 affected files.
Technically, there is also:
http://lintian.debian.org/tags/file-name-in-PATH-is-not-ASCII.html
But there are no instances of that.
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