Hope this is a viable way to answer. I'm kind of the becoming FreeDict maintainer. The Debian package maintainer position seems still vacant to me :)
* 00-database-utf8 This should be added, as long as the source language requires it. * sources They should be there. We will put the CVS files into source.bz at sourceforge. Whether there will be debian source packages, depends on a debian package maitainer coming forward. * "iconv -f utf8 -t iso-8859-1" says "illegal input sequence" iconv gives this error, because the phonetics characters are not allowed in the _iso-8859-1_. I have successfully opened my CVS version of eng-ger.tei with yudit, seeing those characters iconv complained about. Also XML validation was successful.
