Bug#440420: [PROPOSAL] Manual page encoding
On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 11:37:30AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:
> > I'm still open to whether new-world-order pages should go in
> > /usr/share/man/LL.UTF-8 or just /usr/share/man/LL. Pros for LL.UTF-8:
> >
> > * Non-compliant implementations (I'm guessing xman, yelp, etc.) will
> > display English manual pages rather than misencoded garbage. This
> > might not be such a big deal for European languages, but for e.g.
> > Japanese I suspect most people would prefer English to the spew you
> > get by trying to interpret UTF-8 as EUC-JP.
>
> I'd rather fix the other implementations, frankly. All of Debian is
> moving towards UTF-8, as is all of the rest of the Linux world, and I'd
> rather not leave transitional measures around forever.
Mm.
> > I think I am increasingly leaning towards just using /usr/share/man/LL,
> > seeing as man has to try decoding pages there as UTF-8 first anyway, but
> > please comment if you care.
>
> I agree with this position.
OK. I've changed man-db upstream to install its own translated manual
pages in non-.UTF-8 directories again, and will incorporate this option
into the transition plan when it comes time to send it to
-devel-announce.
> > Unfortunately 2.5.0 wasn't quite enough. Aside from a couple of stupid
> > bugs (mostly fixed now), it turns out that we need an extra feature to
> > allow debhelper to produce UTF-8 versions of manual pages without
> > needing the source encoding to be explicitly specified, by guessing the
> > encoding in the same way that man does:
> >
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2007/10/msg00063.html
> >
> > I committed this feature to my development trunk earlier today, and will
> > be working on a 2.5.1 release over the next couple of weeks. After that
> > I'll send Joey a patch for debhelper.
>
> It sounds like the same feature could be used by other man implementations
> that currently can't deal with UTF-8.
Yes; doing so would also fix their misfeatures of attempting to locate
manual pages on disk themselves rather than letting man do it. :-)
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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