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Bug#440420: [PROPOSAL] Manual page encoding



Hi,

On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 12:29:35 +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 02:37:48PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 30, 2007 at 10:28:12PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > > Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:
> > > > I propose that policy should standardise that we move to using UTF-8 as
> > > > the source encoding for all manual pages since it clearly makes sense to
> > > > do so.
> [...]
> > Right. Here's an update; I think I've captured most of the discussion in
> > the thread so far. The following patch could in principle be applied
> > now, given seconds. Wordsmithing welcome, as I'm aware that this is a
> > rather dense recommendation; I'm also looking for seconds for this
> > proposal.

> I'm also looking for at least one more second for this proposal.
> 
> --- orig/policy.sgml
> +++ mod/policy.sgml
> @@ -8521,6 +8521,37 @@
>  	      be present in the future.
>   	  </footnote>
>   	</p>
> +
> +	<p>
> +	  Manual pages in locale-specific subdirectories of
> +	  <file>/usr/share/man</file> should use either UTF-8 or the usual
> +	  legacy encoding for that language (normally the one corresponding
> +	  to the shortest relevant locale name in
> +	  <file>/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED</file>). For example, pages under
> +	  <file>/usr/share/man/fr</file> should use either UTF-8 or
> +	  ISO-8859-1.<footnote><prgn>man</prgn> will automatically detect
> +	  whether UTF-8 is in use. In future, all manual pages will be
> +	  required to use UTF-8.</footnote>
> +	</p>
> +
> +	<p>
> +	  A country name (e.g. <file>de_DE</file>) should not be included in
> +	  the subdirectory name unless it indicates a significant difference
> +	  in the language, as this excludes speakers of the language in
> +	  other countries.<footnote>At the time of writing, Chinese and
> +	  Portuguese are the main languages with such differences, so
> +	  <file>pt_BR</file>, <file>zh_CN</file>, and <file>zh_TW</file> are
> +	  all allowed.</footnote>
> +	</p>
> +
> +	<p>
> +	  Due to limitations in current implementations, all characters
> +	  in the manual page source should be representable in the usual
> +	  legacy encoding for that language, even if the file is
> +	  actually encoded in UTF-8. Safe alternative ways to write many
> +	  characters outside that range may be found in
> +	  <manref name="groff_char" section="7">.
> +	</p>
>        </sect>

Seconded.

regards,
guillem

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