[Bug 226079] Merge Review: libxml2

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Summary: Merge Review: libxml2


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=226079





------- Additional Comments From veillard at redhat.com  2008-05-30 17:23 EST -------
Why do I have to explain to Fedora guys that changing pieces of a package
from upstream is fundamentally wrong ??? Unless you have reported upstream
and check with them you should *never* do that, and having a rule which by
default forces such a behaviour is Just Plain Wrong please tell me who I 
need to complain, i.e. who made that decision, I want to be able to appeal.

I would really like to get out of your head that a packager can just change
bits which come from upstream freely. I would really like people to understand
what bias led ultimately to the OpenSSL Debian fiasco. The fact that I am
'a Red Hat guy' just means I can't let you do that and think you're right.
I need to react and not let this go, precisely.

Okay, give me any good justification for changing the encoding of an
XML file which is part of a package ?

For the ChangeLog the explanation is that the fragments have accumulated
over 10 years of developments, last I checked on this very problem is that
some contributions came from eastern europe, others from western europe
this is a mix of various ISO-8859-*, you just can't convert in one pass
iconv won't make it, it will just silently corrupt the people names. It's
way better to keep it that way, I can't expect upstream to just use UTF-8.
In general encoding is a property of one character. The fact that Fedora
assumes that all characters in a file must expressed with the same encoding
means they give the liberty to the packager to convert the way it feels best
and IMHO that's way over what a packager should be allowed to do.

  please stop assuming upstream is stupid, please stop assuming I'm just
dumb, I may be a grumpy french but I have reason to react negatively when
I see people trying to push on me thing which I think are very much broken.

 Go back to my comment #2, I actually made an effort to play by the rules.
It's when I get a dogmatic answer that I start getting nasty.

 If forced, I would just drop all concerned text files from the package
at least for Fedora, but converting files on the fly at packaging time is
NOT something I will do in any package I maintain.

Daniel

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