Re: man-db locale support

[Fabrizio Polacco <fab@prosa.it>]

On Thu, Sep 30, 1999 at 08:42:01PM +0400, Michael Sobolev wrote:
> > 
> Well, if look on the code of man program, we will see that for every directory (path)
> in MANPATH it adds path/lang *before* this path.  So, from MANPATH=/usr/share/man,
> we'll get MANPATH=/usr/share/man/ru:/usr/share/man, which means that if we do not
> have a translated manual page the default one will be shown.  The patch I sent
> you does the same, but for LANG=country_TERRITORY.ENCODING,VERSION, it adds all of
> them from the most specific to the least specific.  So everything should continue
> to work.  No?

Humm, nice patch, but ... it brakes japanese :-(
Maybe you've missed my last 69k (now 69m) which had something similar:
set the LANG to ja_JP.ujis and it will search .../man/ja_JP.ujis/manX,
.../man/ja_JP/manX, .../man/ja/manX  which is what we wanted, ... or
not?

What should be the correct behaviour?
giving a locale like "ja" serch for all the pages in any man/ja*/manX
place (and giving a locale like "ja_JP.ujis" should it find a manpage in
man/ja/manX or default to english?).
In theory this looks like the most reasonable.

But people asked for the contrary (if I didn't misunderstood): giving
"ja_JP.ujis" as LANG, display pages in man/ja/manX (actual behaviour).


> What I mean is that if one specify -t latin1, one gets a decent result, nothing
> more.  There is a problem with -t latin1, as the `?' character appears as
> something unexpected.  But to my knowledge, nobody hacked groff for supporting
> -t koi8-r (or anything similar).

This is another big source of trouble: it looks like some locales gets
good results using some setting _because_ they use some other tool
hacked to do this.
It's like fixing a bug introducing another bug in a different place
which tries to put thing back in place.

fab, wondering to ask: "is sgml (docbook) able to render your
language/charset on your actual linux screen?"
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