A set of guidelines regarding what characters are permissible in the portage tree and how they should be encoded is required.
Approved on 8-Nov-2004 assuming that implementation will include +documentation for correctly encoding files within nano.
+At present we have several developers and many more users whose names require characters (for example, accents) which are not part of the standard 'safe' 0..127 ASCII range. There is no current standard on how @@ -84,9 +90,9 @@ official decision has been made.
It is proposed that UTF-8 ([1]) is used for encoding ChangeLog and metadata.xml files inside the portage tree.
UTF-8 allows the full range of Unicode ([2]) characters to be expressed, @@ -99,7 +105,7 @@ cannot express the full range of required characters.
For the same reasons as previously, it is proposed that UTF-8 is used as the official encoding for ebuild and eclass files.
However, developers should be warned that any code which is parsed by bash @@ -109,20 +115,20 @@ regular ASCII 0..127 range for compatibility purposes.
Patches must clearly be in the same character set as the file they are patching. For other files/ entries (for example, GNOME desktop files), consistency with the upstream-recommended character set is most sensible.
Characters outside the ASCII 0..127 range cannot safely be used for file or directory names. (Of course, not all characters inside the ASCII 0..127 range can be used safely either.)
The existing tree uses a mixture of encodings. It would be straightforward to fix existing ChangeLogs and metadata files to use UTF-8.
The echangelog tool is character-set agnostic. In order to properly @@ -138,7 +144,7 @@ configured automatically via the gentoo-syntax ([4]) package.