In looking at some long-standing Policy bugs, I see that Policy currently doesn't specify a character set for debian/control and only recommends UTF-8 for debian/changelog in an appendix. I think that it's time to simply require UTF-8 for changelog and control files, and I think the interoperability of using the same character set so that all parsers can assume the same meaning warrants making this RC.
I want to get the sign-off of the release team before making it a must in Policy, however. lintian.debian.org says: debian-changelog-file-uses-obsolete-national-encoding (95 packages, 95 tags) debian-control-file-uses-obsolete-national-encoding (11 packages, 11 tags) so a mass bug filing would be in order here. If this seems like a reasonable goal, I'll raise the mass bug filing on debian-devel for more general approval. Policy bugs: http://bugs.debian.org/143941 http://bugs.debian.org/208011 http://bugs.debian.org/241333 http://bugs.debian.org/246016 (There are also other bugs concerning UTF-8, in particular 99324 and 99933, that have a broader scope and concern all files and filenames in the package. Those I don't think we're ready to deal with yet.) -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
