Comment 18 for bug 637227

(In reply to comment #16)
> At the risk of beating a dead horse, until either jbj or RedHat decide to part
> Bugzillas, this is also RPM's bugzilla.

jbj isn't even Cc'd on this Fedora bug, although as an outsider who happens to
have an account he was of course able to make a comment.

> http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html

Read it again. You evidently misunderstood it the first time.

Note the difference between the following:

A. "You smoke crack. Therefore your opinion is irrelevant".
B. "You have very strange opinions. Therefore I suspect you smoke crack."

The former is the classic ad-hominem fallacy. The latter isn't.

> You are using the word "random" in a manner with which I am unfamiliar.
> Specified and defined character encodings are not "random."

My point is that they _aren't_ specified and defined. In the absence of such
tagging, it's line noise. It's essentially random.

> Get this through your head: This is not Fedora bugzilla.

Heh. Mind if I quote you on that? This bug is filed against a specific version
of a specific product.

> There is no relationship between current locale and the encoding of a
> particular spec file.

Yes, that's the point I made in the immediately subsequent sentence.

> 1. Spec files are encoded as US-ASCII/UTF-8 by default. Any containing
> characters which cannot be encoded thusly must specify their encoding via either
> a header value ("Encoding: ISO-8859-2") or a macro value ("%define
> __spec_encoding ISO-8859-2"), whichever you think is better.
>
> 2. Values which contain non-ASCII characters should specify encoding similar to
> the way languages are currently specified. For example, PLD uses Summary(pl):
> and description -l pl to denote Polish content. This could be expanded to allow
> Summary(pl.utf8) and description -l pl.utf8.

That's only a partial solution, and it's the uninteresting part of the solution.
The more interesting part is what you do with an existing RPM database if it
contains random data. And I do mean 'random' -- if it's in untagged character
sets it might as well be line noise.