Re: ITP: libevent-rpc-perl -- Event based transparent Client/Server RPC framework
Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
> On Sat, 15 Apr 2006, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Putting on my pod2man upstream maintainer hat, please note that I
>> cannot apply the same transformation upstream because \[:o] is a
>> groff-specific escape that will cause the generated *roff to not work
>> on non-Linux platforms.
> But Debian only uses groff so it makes sense to have a Debian specific
> change to pod2man which does that.
I'm not sure that it does. This will mean that any Perl package built on
a Debian system will have man pages that contain markup that will choke
other *roff implementations. This means that those man pages can't be
copied to other systems and can't be installed in shared file systems used
by non-Debian systems. I'm not particularly fond of the idea of breaking,
for users, a long-standing property of pod2man, namely its generation of
completely portable *roff output.
> Maybe you could provide a mean to have some automatic post-processing of
> generated manpages? That way the perl package could dropt a
> groff-specific post-processing script doing those conversions...
It's on my long-term to-do list to add a switch to pod2man that says
--yes-i-will-always-use-groff-and-dont-care-about-portability, but it's
not clear to me that turning this on in Debian is a good idea.
>> characters since there is no portable way to do so. The above is not a
>> bad solution.
> In that case, we can fix all manpages by fixing one package, it's
> certainly better that having such hacks in many perl packages.
Using non-ASCII characters in man pages without a declared encoding is
invalid POD and, in future versions of pod2man, will result in the
appending of a POD ERRORS section to the generated man page pointing out
that the POD is bad. Fixing the POD source is not a hack. :)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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