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. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
