On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 07:29:59PM +0000, Scott James Remnant wrote: > On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 18:44, Joel Baker wrote: > > > Is it valid to use UTF-8 in the debian/copyright file? (Specifically, it > > is possibly to accurately reproduce a copyright symbol, using UTF-8, which > > would be a nice thing to have...) > > > There exists no policy for this; therefore common sense takes > precedence. UTF-8 is fast becoming the defacto standard character set > (with good reason) so I'd use it.
I figured, but I wanted to get other opinions.
> It's probably a good additional point that most of the standard
> character sets have no © symbol and that there is no legal basis for
> "(C)" being a valid representation of it.
Indeed it is.
> On the other hand, policy states UTF-8 for Changelog which breaks katie
> if your name contains accented characters because you're still forbidden
> by policy to use UTF-8 in debian/control.
The proper answer to which is to allow UTF-8 in at least some portion of
the control file. I can understand not allowing it in, say, package names
(since those are used to construct filenames, and may be on systems that
don't have UTF-8 capable filesystems), but the Maintainer field should be
allowed to use it.
> We are become grey; we stand between the policy and the star...
I keep seeing comments that policy describes usage, as often as prescribing
it; I can't think of anything that would actually be harmed by using UTF-8
in the copyright file (particularly if it's primarily for the copyright
symbol and some author's names), since it will still be readable to folks
even on non-UTF-8 terminals (and, of course, can still be 'recode'ed into
whatever their terminal can handle...)
--
Joel Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ,''`.
Debian GNU/NetBSD(i386) porter : :' :
`. `'
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