On Monday, October 14, 2013 6:56:49 AM UTC-7, John Bollinger wrote:

>
> On Monday, October 14, 2013 2:40:14 AM UTC-5, Erik Dalén wrote:
>>
>> I checked this a bit further, and it seems like the policy is to always 
>> have UTF-8 encoding in RPM descriptions etc, but that RPM will happily 
>> build packages with text in other encodings.
>>
>>
>
> Whose policy, exactly?  As far as I can tell, the RPM file format 
> specifications do not define the character encoding to be used for textual 
> data, therefore it is dangerous (dare I even say "wrong"?) for code that 
> consumes that data to make any assumption whatever about its encoding.  
> Absent a means to determine the correct encoding, the "strings" from RPM 
> headers ought to be handled as byte arrays (since that's what they actually 
> are).
>
>  
>
>> But it seems like a decent workaround to force encoding here as RPM seems 
>> to print the original text out to the console without any charset 
>> translation to the system locale.
>>
>>
>
> Forcing UTF-8 would rescue only the case where the RPM text is encoded 
> specifically in that encoding (including pure, 7-bit ASCII).  If the actual 
> encoding were anything else, and it contained non-ASCII characters, then 
> you would again get an encoding error.  If it is important to decode the 
> bytes to characters then it would be better to assume Latin-1, which admits 
> no invalid code sequences.
>
> On the other hand, if it is essential to header text to the logical 
> character sequence from which it was encoded then there is no substitute 
> for a reliable method of determining the encoding.
>

So it seems forcing the encoding to Latin-1 is a reasonable short-term fix 
at least?

Whatever is decided, something needs to be done for 3.3.2 as currently yum 
package upgrades (using "ensure => latest") are broken in 3.3.1. That seems 
bad.

Jos


>
> John
>
>

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