RFC: Description text in packages

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le lundi 15 décembre 2008 à 08:41 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi a écrit :

> Currently, I'm opposed to having a Guideline that mandates UTF-8 over
> ASCII.

And I'm opposed to continuing to abuse ASCII glyphs and pretend they
stand for something other than their creators intended. One couldn't
avoid it when the available encoding didn't provide a clean way to write
some stuff, but doing it in 2008 is plain dumb.

People who want to write pure ASCII descriptions in UTF-8 locales just
have to find a wording that does not put them in the situation where
non-ASCII UTF-8 is the clean way to write things. They're no more
special than the people whose stuff we refuse because it uses
non-standard deprecated legacy encodings.

> Description is an area almost completely left to the
> maintainer's discretion

The encoding isn't.

> ASCii can be useful on the console whether the system is setup with a
> utf-8 locale (which is our default, and therefore if we do mandate using
> an encoding other than ASCii it's what we should use) or something more
> limited (for instance, Asian countries still haven't settled on utf-8
> everywhere.)

But Red Hat and Fedora did. And our default Asian locales are UTF-8.

If someone acually wants a pure ASCII environment, he should work on an
en_US at ASCII locale and stop trying to mess up the distro UTF-8 defaults.

> Note that this is an area where I'd change my stance if package
> maintianers were to say that they want to have this sort of change.  I
> just want to avoid alienating maintainers with conformance to this sort
> of rule on descriptions without a higher return.

Red Hat didn't choose UTF-8 over ASCII just to annoy ASCII users. UTF-8
brings very desirable text features. Letting the ASCII crowd mandate
avoiding the use of non-ASCII UTF-8 negates the original encoding change
decision, and brings back the stupid brittle transcoding hacks that
UTF-8 was supposed to eliminate (as the OP message clearly shows).

I'd rather have our package descriptions look good in our default
encoding and default GUI update tool than have them look good in
marginally used legacy equipments that do not support current technical
standards.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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