Re: man-db locale support
On Fri, Oct 01, 1999 at 12:07:24PM +0300, Fabrizio Polacco wrote:
> 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).
>
Sorry, I do not quite understand. If one sets LANG=ja, it should only look
into man/ja/manX and man/manX directories. If ones sets LANG=ja_JP.ujis, it
should look into man/ja_JP.ujis/manX, man/ja_JP/manX, man/ja/manX, and man/manX
directories. So it should easily find a japanese man page, if it exists, or
show an english one. Or have I missed something and if one sets
LANG=ja_JP.ujis, it skips man/ja/manX page?
Well, actually, one Russian speaking person contacted me privately and asked a
reasonable question: do we really need to look into /ru_RU/ and /ru/
hierarchies if LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R. At the moment, no character recoding is
done, so if it man program does not find a manpage in /ru_RU.KOI8-R/, it should
directly go for the english variant, if the latter exists. But again, it's a
question of policy. FHS says something about man page hierarchy, but it does
not specify the order in which the man program should look for the manpage.
Does such a document exist?
> > 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.
Exactly. :) It's a common practice here to hack the system in a way that makes
things working. At this stage, one stops. :)
> fab, wondering to ask: "is sgml (docbook) able to render your
> language/charset on your actual linux screen?"
I believe, no. :) It's a common question for people who want create documents in
Russian. There is a problem with jade that does not correctly (I do not know
what that means) support needed entities.
--
Mike
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