On Thu, 31 Mar 2011, Bill Allombert wrote: > First this might force users to use UTF-8 locale. While this is the default, > this is not > mandatory in Debian. I know users that stays with ISO8859-1 because they have > a lot of > text files in that encoding. > > Until the C.UTF-8 proposal is implemented and mandated, a valid UTF-8 locale > might not even > exist on the system. > > Secondly, filenames inside .deb are not localizable, and it might prove > problematic for users to deal with filenames in complex encoding. Case > at end, I do not have Japanese font installed so I could not tell apart > two filenames.
It's definitely problematic to deal with filenames using another encoding than the currently configured one. But you don't have to deal "manually" with non-ascii filenames provided by packages that often. Filenames are not localizables like any gettext string, but there are valid use cases where filenames might rightfully contain non-ascii characters. How would you deal with a software where upstream has made a choice implying some non-ASCII files if you were to forbid it in Debian policy ? The logical conclusion is that we should recommend to avoid non-ASCII filenames but if it can't be avoided, then they should really be UTF-8 encoded so that it works nicely for the vast majority of users who stick to the default configuration. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer Follow my Debian News ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.com (English) ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.fr (Français) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110401070249.gf29...@rivendell.home.ouaza.com
