Comment 12 for bug 637227

Your sarcastic suggestion is likely to be taken seriously by the less sober
among us... you know pefectly well that you can't just apply iconv(3) until you
get something which works -- there are a huge number of 8-bit encodings which
can be converted to UTF-8 but don't actually _mean_ anything. Untagged non-UTF-8
data is just line noise.

Tagging data is pointless -- just store it in a portable format (i.e. UTF-8) in
all RPM metadata, and convert it only for display if you have to.

You might be able to implement some broken hack in other situations to appease
some outspoken Luddites, but we certainly wouldn't want anything like that in
Fedora -- just require UTF-8 and abort the build if it's not valid.