Fw: [gentoo-portage-dev] changelog encoding

[Marius Mauch]

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 13:56:17 +0100
From: Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@g.o>
To: Marius Mauch <genone@g.o>
Cc: gentoo-portage-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] changelog encoding


[ not sure if I can post to gentoo-portage-dev, please forward on if
not... ]

On Fri, 8 Oct 2004 14:31:52 +0200 Marius Mauch <genone@g.o>
wrote:
| On 10/07/04  Brian wrote:
| > What is the official encoding method(s) for the changelogs.   It has
| > been reported that porthole often fails getting the changelogs due
| > to the encoding.  Currently it is assuming ascii.   Many are
| > reported to be iso-8859-1.
| 
| I don't think we have an official encoding, but I think ciaranm knows
| a bit more about that issue.

Yup. We *need* to have an official encoding. Reason being, at least one
developer has a non-(ASCII as in characters 0..126 only) character in
their name. Said encoding should also apply to ebuilds, but not to
files/ entries (I could give the lengthy explanation if anyone really
wants to know, but basically certain things would break).

I've been whinging about this on and off for about a year now, and every
time it's been dismissed as irrelevant :)

If we're going to standardise on an encoding, it's got to be UTF-8.
iso-8859-1 is not sufficient to represent every developer (and potential
patch contributor)'s name correctly. UTF-16 and plain old four byte
unicode aren't compatible with our existing files (in UTF-8, characters
1 to 126 are the same as in regular ASCII). Yes, UTF-8 kinda sucks in
terms of space when encoding japanese or russian characters, but since
these will be a rare occurance it's not really a problem.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Sparc, MIPS, Vim, Fluxbox)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm