[Fedora-packaging] file-not-utf8 complaints

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, Jun 01, 2008 at 10:17:32AM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Patrice Dumas wrote:
>> On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 04:09:25PM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>>> However, the flipside of this is if a program has an xml config file  
>>> that the user is expected to edit manually in a text editor and the   
>>> program will adapt to multiple encodings (for instance, by using 
>>> libxml2  to parse the file[1]_) having it exist in utf-8 is much 
>>> better than  having it exist in SOME_EXOTIC_ENCODING.  In this case 
>>> it's the program  
>>
>> I disagree. It is not an obvious choice and should be left to the
>> maintainer. It depends on the user target of the software, for instance.
>>
> Please state your counter example.  I'm laying out the parameters by  
> which we could relax the current rule.  If we don't lay out the  
> boundaries correctly the replacement rule will end up still being too  
> restrictive.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that there is no current rule? Except
that rpmlint warning/errors should be handled if possible, but there is
nothing about that in the guidelines (spec file and filename should be
utf8, though).

Here is a wording that would seem right to me:

Files that don't carry information about their encoding should be
converted to UTF-8. It is typically useful for NEWS files with author
names with acceented characters. There may be exceptions, for example a
README.cn file written in chinese may be encoded in a popular chinese
encoding like Big5.

Files that carry over their encoding (xml, tex, info...) may also be 
converted to UTF-8, but the decision is left to the package maintainer. 
It may be especially relevant for files that are to be edited by the
user, since it may be difficult to edit a file not in UTF-8, while UTF-8 
should be handled by most editors automatically, as the default for 
fedora is an UTF-8 locale.



--
Pat