Re: Bug#467249: FW by lidaobing@gmail.com : Bug#467249: man-db: over sensitive on the spell of locale
On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 10:10:32PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 09:30:55PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> >On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 09:21:41PM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> >man-db really does have some special-casing here. Trust me. It was
> >necessary at the time. There are a finite number of known aliases for
> >the very small number of locales in question, and until it becomes
> >unnecessary I will simply support those.
> >
> >(And I agree that it should go away, but can't easily just yet.)
>
> Is there some way to query what character set a locale uses?
Yes, nl_langinfo (CODESET).
> If not, I think that man-db should default to UTF-8 (since that *is*
> the standard on Debian) and handle exceptions to that. Processing an
> ASCII manpage as UTF-8 is a no-op. And it's pretty easy to tell if
> something isn't valid UTF-8, and man-db can handle that as it normally
> would.
Please review the changes that I made in man-db 2.5.0 and 2.5.1, which I
think make this speculation unnecessary.
> AIUI, PostScript doesn't have UTF-8 support either, yet it seems to work
> just fine. Anyway, newer versions of groff have a conversion tool that
> maps UTF-8 (or any arbitrary character set) input into glyph names. But
> Debian's groff has been very heavily patched with support for kinsoku
> shori (prohibition character handling) and so we cannot simply update to
> a newer version. Believe me, if it were that easy, I'm sure Colin would
> have done it.
Indeed so (I have tried before). I've had it with special-cased hacks to
groff - I want either something that goes upstream, or else to stick
with what we have until something *can* go upstream. I'm finished with
nasty typographically-unsound workarounds.
> >Are you working with Brian M. Carlson on this? He has been working on a
> >solution acceptable to groff upstream, which is, frankly, the only way I
> >want to go now. He has already made substantial progress with character
> >class support.
>
> Please be aware that I have little time with school right now, so this
> may not be implemented soon. In fact, it may not be ready in time for
> lenny's release. I will sit down and work on it some more soon, but my
> time is limited. If people want more information on my plan of attack,
> please do let me know, and I'll be happy to share.
Drat. Understood, though. I do follow the groff list (when my spam
filters haven't decided that it's statistically all spam ...) and do
hope to find time to build something useful on top of the work you've
posted there already.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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