Incorrect display of Cyrillic characters in the description

[eoan-ermine]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues and found none matching what I'm reporting.

Bug Description

Cyrillic characters in the description of deb packages are displayed incorrectly.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Create debian package with cyrillic description

mkdir -p sample/DEBIAN
cat > sample/DEBIAN/control << EOL
Package: sample
Version: 0.1
Maintainer: admin@eoanermine.com
Architecture: all
Description: Привет, мир
EOL
dpkg-deb --build sample

2. Open the package with app center

Expected behavior

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html states that all control files must be encoded in UTF-8. My control file is

sample/DEBIAN/control: Unicode text, UTF-8 text

So I expect correct display of description.

Ubuntu release

24.04 LTS

What architecture are you using?

amd64

System info

No response

Additional context

No response

[d-loose]

Thanks for the report - it looks like a problem in PackageKit to me:

While observing PackageKit signals on dbus via

dbus-monitor --system "interface='org.freedesktop.PackageKit.Transaction'"

run

pkcon get-details ./sample.deb

This correctly gives

Package description
  package:     sample-0.1.all
  summary:     Привет, мир
  license:     unknown
  group:       unknown
  description: Привет, мир
  size:        482 bytes
  url:

on stdout, and the corresponding PackageKit signal is

signal time=1747911651.388906 sender=:1.1437 -> destination=(null destination) serial=219 path=/6837_dbbcaaed; interface=org.freedesktop.PackageKit.Transaction; member=Details
   array [
      dict entry(
         string "package-id"
         variant             string "sample;0.1;all;local"
      )
      dict entry(
         string "summary"
         variant             string "Привет, мир"
      )
      dict entry(
         string "description"
         variant             string "Привет, мир"
      )
      dict entry(
         string "url"
         variant             string ""
      )
      dict entry(
         string "license"
         variant             string "unknown"
      )
      dict entry(
         string "size"
         variant             uint64 482
      )
   ]

However, if I create a PackageKit transaction over dbus and call org.freedesktop.PackageKit.Transaction.GetDetailsLocal manually, I get the following signal:

signal time=1747911599.059665 sender=:1.1437 -> destination=(null destination) serial=179 path=/6835_bbcbbddb; interface=org.freedesktop.PackageKit.Transaction; member=Details
   array [
      dict entry(
         string "package-id"
         variant             string "sample;0.1;all;local"
      )
      dict entry(
         string "summary"
         variant             string "??????, ???"
      )
      dict entry(
         string "description"
         variant             string "??????, ???"
      )
      dict entry(
         string "url"
         variant             string ""
      )
      dict entry(
         string "license"
         variant             string "unknown"
      )
      dict entry(
         string "size"
         variant             uint64 482
      )
   ]

[d-loose]

Correction - apparently we can call PackageKit.Transaction.SetHints with something like locale=en_US.UTF-8 before calling GetDetailsLocal and this gives the results in the correct encoding. Seems like the default isn't UTF-8 in PackageKit for some reason 🤷