RFC: Description text in packages

[Seth Vidal]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2008, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>
>
> Le Lun 15 décembre 2008 16:37, Richard Hughes a écrit :
>
>> Next on my list are insane descriptions.
>
> Specs files and most notably human-targeted text inside them are
> UTF-8. Please do not invent any broken application-side transcoding
> system.

+1.

If we make description (or any field) a special format and try to rely on 
it I think you'll find that ISVs and 3rd party providers of packages will 
ignore it/not know about it and then screw up PK. It's better to accept 
all sorts of wackiness and live with it. If the package maintainer wants 
their descriptions to be useful to people then they can clean them up to 
look better in PK.

Having said that an rpmlint check that says no description can be > than 
512bytes might not be a terrible thing.

-sv