On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 06:09:09PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > - > On Tue, 2 Sep 2003 23:25:57 +0200, Denis Barbier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > > > On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 06:18:39PM +0200, Josip Rodin wrote: > >> On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 05:48:27AM +0200, Martin Godisch wrote: > >> > > > Anyway I fail to see which problems arise with this proposal, > >> > > > could someone enlighten me? > >> > > > >> > > It's too broad. Has anyone tested if the packaging system > >> > > correctly processes double-byte information everywhere? > >> > > >> > I had no problems reading mbc descriptions with dpkg and apt so > >> > far. Is there some special test I should do? > >> > >> Your proposal says "the control fields". Description is just one, > >> what about all the others? (If it was your intent to only do this > >> for descriptions, why doesn't the proposal say so?) > > > My understanding of the proposal is that if a field use non-ASCII > > characters, encoding should be UTF-8. It does not say that all > > fields can contain non-ASCII characters, which is why current > > packaging tools does not need to be patched. > > This is a copout. If the field is not supposed to have non > ascii characters (since the tool chain can not yet handle them), then > policy should not be specifying the encoding of these illegal > characters.
Wrong logic. For instance changelog.Debian encoding is specified, but there are areas where accented letters are invalid, as in package names. > > Currently 165 binary packages contain non-ASCII characters in > > Maintainer or Description fields; there are 56 binary packages with > > non-ASCII characters in their description (which means that you are > > responsible of 9% of this garbage ;)), and 26 maintainer names with > > such letters (but only 21 unique maintainers). This is an upper > > limit, maybe some of these strings are already UTF-8 encoded. > > No. If policy blesses non ascii charactrers, then there are > going to be a lot more packages that shall have UTF-8 characters in > them, and the tool chain would still not be ready to deal with them. Err you told that a significant number of packages would be buggy, I wanted to exhibit figures. Denis
