Your patch implements its own word wrapper. Did you consider using perl's UTF-8 support, and Text::Wrap? Debconf does not currently let perl know what encoding is used by text, but if it did let perl know, then Text::Wrap should be able to get multibyte characters right. I don't know if it would handle multi-column characters or low-density whitespace text. Anyway, I'd feel better if I knew you'd at least considered doing things this way. If perl is indeed lacking a word wraping module that is suitable for all languages, then it would be better to add such a module to perl, than just to debconf.
Your Debconf::Wrap module should export the functions it provides. Code that calls an exported wrap() would then just work, unchanged. It seems to me there must be a better way to expose wcwidth to perl than implementing your own with a table. Have you considered an XS library? I haven't a chance of being able to maintain the code in Debconf::Wrap. If debconf does use it we will have to come up with some mechanism for you to maintain it, either a shared subversion repository or putting it in a separate package which debconf could use. I suspect that this word wrapper is a fair bit slower than Text::Wrap. -- see shy jo
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