Bug#486425: ITP: bomstrip -- strip Byte-Order Marks from UTF-8 text files

["Bryan Donlan" <bdonlan@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 5:14 AM, Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 10:55:47AM +0200, Guus Sliepen wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 03:08:02AM +0300, Peter Pentchev wrote:
>>
>> > * Package name    : bomstrip
>> >   Programming Lang: Awk, Brainf*ck, C, C++, Forth, Haskell, OCaml, Ook!,
>> >                     Pascal, PHP, Perl, PostScript, Python, Ruby, sed,
>> >                 Unlambda
>>
>> All these programming languages got me wondering. Apparently the same
>> program is implemented in all these languages. But you only need one to
>> get the desired functionality. Also, I see the sed variant is just a
>> one-liner. Perhaps it is better if this functionality is merged with a
>> package like coreutils or recode, if it is not already there someway.
>
> As the author writes on his website, the whole point of the bomstrip
> project being a collection of implementations is more of a social /
> political goal of "spreading the word", showing how easy it is,
> bringing attention to the broken UTF-8 text files that some programs
> generate, and so on.
>
> IMHO, the distribution also servers as a nice way to demonstrate
> a simple (well, admittedly, a *very* simple :)) task done in various
> languages.
>
> Hm.  Okay, so maybe the two command-line utilities and the collection
> might be separated.  IMHO, the collection *is* still useful on its own :)
> If others share this opinion, I may either create two separate packages,
> or just remove the command-line utilities and file a wishlist bug
> against coreutils or textutils or something like that.  How does that
> strike you?  What do others think?

Would the collection really be useful in /binary/ form, however? If
the goal is to show how easy it is to write, installing a bunch of
functionally identical
/usr/bin/bomstrip.{c,ada,cplusplus,haskell,ocaml} binaries won't
demonstrate much :)