Re: Let's fix our NEWS files!

[Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl>]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 11:40:14AM -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> The NEWS files we release [1] obviously use UTF-8 encoding, but when
> it's displayed from a web browser the browser has no way to know that.
> I think Firefox has some heuristic to guess the encoding, but we should
> make it work in other browsers too. WebKit correctly treats our NEWS
> files as ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) text for compatibility with old websites,
> which results in people's names being messed up in our NEWS. It's been
> broken forever, nothing new.
>
> To fix it, we can either:
>
>  * Specify the encoding in our HTTP headers. That would have to be done
> on each mirror that hosts the NEWS, so can't really do that.
>  * Specify the encoding in the document. We have to insert a zero-width 
> non-breaking space (U+FEFF) as the first character in the document. I
> tested this just now and it works fine in WebKit.

Suggest another option:
 1. Prevent download.gnome.org from redirecting NEWS files
 2. Configure UTF-8 header

This as putting that special character in the text file seems rather
ugly.

> I found the code to handle this in /usr/local/bin/ftpadmin on master
> (search for "moduleprint") but I'm afraid to touch that file. Actually,
> I hope I don't have permission to touch it anyway. :) Is it maintained
> in git anywhere?

It's located in the sysadmin-bin module. I guess I should add a comment
explaining this.

-- 
Regards,
Olav