RPM submission script

[Eric S. Raymond]

seth vidal <skvidal at phy.duke.edu>:
> > One of the fields handed to the CGI may be a URL pointing to an RPM.
> > It seems to me that the encoding of strings *in the RPM* is not an issue at
> > all for bug-bugzilla.  Only the contents of the fields in the job card
> > is an issue.  I don't understand why the requirement that those be UTF-8
> > should ever be onerous. 
> 
> b/c the content you're providing may well be data that is in an rpm
> header or in the output of rpm -qi somepkg.
> 
> as the example I gave to Nicholas, rpm -qi cups - read the description
> field, note the (R), notice that's it is 1 character, not 3.
> 
> your program can force the conversion and replace the characters outside
> the 128 range with ?, but in the case of filenames that are using
> non-utf-8 encoding you WILL lose some data.

Ahhhh.  Now I see.  This is not actually an issue sbout bug-bugzilla at
all.  It's an issue about how fedora-submit will transcode non-ASCII stuff
that it mines out of RPM metadata fields.

I was aware of this problem.  fedora-submit will have to call iconv in
certain circumstances to mung all the fields into UTF-8.  Sometimes
it will fail and fedora-submit will error out as a result.  Life is hard.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>