Hi aliens,
I'm writing this mail to all CPAN authors who are registered with a
name containing bytes that have the 8th bit on.
Today PAUSE has made the switch from LATIN1 to UTF-8 in the database
and is going to complete this step in the next days, so please be
prepared that a few things can work unexpectedly during the next days.
Let's face the problematic areas:
1. The forms on PAUSE will issue UTF-8 forms and accept them. If your
browser doesn't handle UTF-8, you will get a LATIN1 form and PAUSE
will translate them to UTF-8 back and forth on the fly. So this
should just work. I know that Non-Japanese Netscape versions are
not able to edit Japanese forms, but this will not hurt the
Japanese users who usually have their own Netscape.
2. The files created by cronjobs that contain your names are:
authors/00whois.html I have half way converted to XHTML, so
UTF-8 is OK. I'll fix the XHTML to
perfection in the next days.
authors/01mailrc.txt.gz I intend to keep this file as it is
and fill with UTF-8
The second of these files is used by CPAN.pm, so your names will
come out as UTF-8 and if the terminal understands it, users will
enjoy the output and if the terminal doesn't understand it, they
will see the infamous UTF-8 gibberish. Some of you will consider
this a breakage, but I expect it will be fixable in a future
version of CPAN.pm and for mailer programs we are used to bad
bahaviour anyway.
All other generated files do not contain names, just English text
and userids, so no problem there.
3. The four symlinks under CPAN/authors that contain high-bit-bytes
will just be deleted without replacement.
4. Future mails from PAUSE will be UTF-8 encoded. Most mailers
nowadays can handle that perfectly well from my experience. PAUSE
will not insert UTF-8 into headers.
That's all I have to say for today. Should the need arise that we
discuss more about this, I'll find a mailing list where we can do it,
but in general I expect that you can send your bugreports and
suggestions directly to me and that all bugs are resolved in a few
days.
Thanks for you attention, Enjoy & Regards,
--
andreas
