Re: Sponsoring of topcom

[Doug Torrance <douglas.a.torrance@gmail.com>]

On 7/5/20 3:16 AM, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi Doug,
>
> when attempting to sponsor topcom I get the lintian warnings:
>
> W: topcom source: national-encoding debian/TOPCOM-manual.html
> N:
> N: A file is not valid UTF-8.
> N:
> N: Debian has used UTF-8 for many years. Support for national encodings is
> N: being phased out. This file probably appears to users in mangled
> N: characters (also called mojibake).
> N:
> N: Packaging control files must be encoded in valid UTF-8.
> N:
> N: Please convert the file to UTF-8 using iconv or a similar tool.
> N:
> N: Severity: warning
> N:
> N: Check: files/encoding
> N:
> W: topcom: national-encoding usr/share/doc/topcom/README
> W: topcom: national-encoding usr/share/doc/topcom/TOPCOM-manual.html
>
> It would not really stop me from uploading but I would consider to
> convert these files to UTF-8. If you have good reasons to keep the
> files in the old encoding just let me know and I'll upload as is.

Thanks for the review! I think these are new Lintian warnings, and I 
hadn't bothered running it again since topcom was Lintian clean when it 
was originally uploaded a few weeks ago. Whoops!

Anyway, I added a target to d/rules which uses iconv for the README, and 
instead of just using the manual downloaded from the upstream webpage 
with Latin-1 encoding, now it's generated from the TeX source (obtained 
from the tarball of an earlier version) to use UTF-8.

> PS: I think I've suggested it before - but I think it makes perfectly
> sense if you apply as Debian Maintainer.

That's absolutely my plan! However, I live in a very rural part of the 
US, and American DD's are very spread out. So it will take some travel 
(post-coronavirus) to meet with a DD to get my GPG key signed.

Thanks again!
Doug