ubuntu patch 14_html2text_preferred encodes README in UTF-8 without updating metadata

[Daniel Hartwig]

Package: aptitude
Version: 0.6.8-1ubuntu1

When viewed online [Help > User's Manual], the English README file contains numerous character encoding errors.

The file doc/html-to-text converts a html document to text in a particular encoding. The ubuntu patch 14_html2text_preferred ignores the specified encoding and outputs all text documents in UTF-8. When viewing these files online the encoding is determined by various /translated/ strings in the programs source that are not updated by the patch.

UTF-8 is not equivalent with ISO_8859-1.

The binary package aptitude-common contains a file README, generated at build time using html-to-text with a /requested encoding/ of ISO_8859-1. At run time this same encoding is specified at src/ui.cc:1126. The ubuntu patch causes this file to be encoded in UTF-8 without updating the metadata, causing the encoding problems for C and other locales that use this particular file.

14_html2text_preferred must either: respect the requested encoding; or update the program so that the online viewer does not use the wrong encoding.

[Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)]

Is this still a bug, or has it been fixed?

I am asking because this is dated 2013.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

All I can say is that the patch is still being applied

https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/aptitude/tree/debian/patches/14_html2text_preferred