[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  2008-05-31 06:19 EST -------
Okay, I will drop ChangeLog and News from the package, after reading this
and the thread it looks apparently more important to the Fedora Packaging
guys to follow blindly a "This has to be UTF-8" rule than understanding
that people may have preferences set in their viewing and editing tools.
I would think it is more important to be able to read the ChangeLog missing
some characters than not seeing anything. Not a big deal they will go look
upstream if they really need this.

For the extended review from comment #11, thanks, I will look at those, best
is probably to drop anything which gives problems. For the spec file specifics
if you have time to derive a patch I will take it. For the DESTDIR stuff
over the years libxml2 had to support it, sometime it broke, I think other
OSes rely on it (BSDs) but I don't have a 100% guaranteed answer to this.

W.r.t. comment #13 , the ChangeLog is 19000+ lines how would you make sure
you actually guessed the encoding of characters in a name correctly ? IMHO
you just can't unless chasing each people name and making sure it matches.
That's history, I prefer to keep it that way. If the history annoys Fedora
I will just drop it from the package. 
The argument for it having to be UTF-8 just doesn't hold, you're picking
one encoding while, the problem is that 1/ you can't garantee there is only
one encoding in a text file 2/ even if it's the case you have no metadata
to indicate what encoding was used for authoring. Blindly assuming this has
to be UTF-8 is a wrong and lost battle, even the Unicode consortium would never
try to suggest something that radical, and sorry if I were to write a README.cn
I would use a BIG5 encoding in it, not UTF-8, because that's not what the
concerned people would expect. Get yourself a filesystem with metadata if you
really want to solve the problem, forcing upstream into UTF-8 or converting
on the fly are both wrong IMHO.

For the NEWS file it's actually generated via XSLT when the package is released
  <xsl:output method="text" encoding="ISO-8859-1"/>
it could be switched to UTF-8 without problem but converting at rpm generation
time is just the Wrong Way of doing it.

Still w.r.t. #13 it's not so much that I think I have higher priorities to do,
it's that I see things imposed like a dogma, that they look broken to me, and
that I feel that trying to change the minds of people around about this is 
a lost battle. It's getting a religious thing, and my belief is that changing
files coming from upstream is fundamentally wrong %doc or not. Your religion
v.s. my religion, we will go nowhere, and I prefer to do something else. 

Daniel


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