[Peter Samuelson] > I suggest that the affected source packages[3] be run through the > command 'iconv -f ORIGINAL_CHARSET -t utf-8' as soon as convenient.
No, as you noticed this list is short and can be processed in a more elegant manner, e.g. sympa description uses a no-break space where a normal space would suffice, so telling maintainer to convert to UTF-8 is not a good idea. I filed several bugreports months ago for packages having non-ASCII characters in their description, 3 are closed (#245592, #245594, #245596) and 2 are still open: itcl3 (#242690) and krb4 (#242694). IMO such bugreports are better than mass bug filing because the 3 closed bugreports did not switch to UTF-8 but converted to ASCII instead. This requires a manual processing because instructions are not identical for all bugreports. Denis