[Slackbuilds-users] Bad character in snappy.info

[Christoph Willing]

On 9/6/21 10:55 pm, Didier Spaier wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Le 09/06/2021 à 14:00, Christoph Willing a écrit :
>> While working on updating HooRex for python 3, I discovered that in
>> development/snappy/snappy.info, there is an errant character in the
>> MAINTAINER field. Could someone fix please?
>>
>> To see the resulting error when reading that file in python, run the
>> following python script in the development/snappy directory:
>>
>> #!/usr/bin/env python3
>> with open('snappy.info', 'r') as f:
>>       txt = f.read()
> 
> The second character of the maintainer's first name : "Mário" is a LATIN
> SMALL
> LETTER A WITH ACUTE according to UNICODE, in an UTF-8 encoding (U+00DE1
> or á).
> 
> Which leads to a request. In  http://slackbuilds.org/guidelines/ it is
> written:
> 
> "It's recommended to use plain ASCII for all files that are being
> submitted to
> SBo"
> 
> However, most languages use characters outside of the ASCII set. Why not
> allow
>  an UTF-8 encoding, in which all maintainers names can be properly written?
> 

As a matter of principle, that would be the right thing to do.

However the tools we commonly use to parse SlackBuilds aren't
particularly consistent in their dealings with UTF-8. I quickly tried
less, cat, elvis, vim, nvi, pico and, of course, my little python3
reader above on that file and found several different interpretations.

chris