Hello,
Since there may be a version of LFS that supports UTF-8 and other
multibyte encodings in the future, that version has to provide the "man"
program that can display manual pages in UTF-8 locales. However, man-1.x
and groff-1.19.x suck. See below.
The solution is either to apply two workarounds below, or (better)
switch to Debian-patched groff-1.18.1.1 (for -Tnippon and -Tascii8
devices) and Debian-patched man-db (it automagically uses the proper
device and trailing iconv pipe if needed). This also means addition of
db or gdbm to the book because man-db depends on one of those two
database packages. Please vote if we should go with man-db or with the
workarounds below.
1) The book currently provides "-lang en" as a part of man ./configure
string. Readers will see that "man --help" produces this line:
Cannot open the message catalog "man" for locale "de_DE.UTF-8"
(NLSPATH="<none>")
Some readers will add something like -lang en,de (or even -lang all) to
work around that and then will get an installation that displays
unreadable squares instead of readable accented letters in de_DE.UTF-8
locale (de_DE.ISO-8859-1 works fine). Worse, in ru_RU.UTF-8 the entire
output of man --help is a sequence of unreadable squares!
The reason is that man still uses the old "catgets" translation
mechanism instaed of "gettext" and thus doesn't preform recoding from
translator's charset to the user's one.
Solution: explain the problem (previous sentence) and add "+lang none"
to man's ./configure line. Then, man will always display its help text
and error messages in English, and will never complain about missing
message catalogs.
2) The default groff setup produces pages full of garbage in UTF-8
locales instead of translated manuals (this also happened in RedHat
Linux 8).
Proper groff setup is cumbersome and will take a lot of space in the
book text. It must be noted that, among many possible setups implemented
by distros, the one most compatible with BLFS and beyond-BLFS packages
is chosen. In the approach below, BLFS instructions just produce working
manual pages. For other possible setups, it is needed to add
instructions for recoding translated manual pages to each BLFS package,
and that is not possible due to BLFS size.
Decision tree for the proper NROFF line in /etc/man.conf is below,
explanation is in the man-i18n hint:
I) if the manual pages for your locale (as supplied with source packages
like shadow) are not stored in ISO-8859-1, goto III
II) NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc
(note the missing -Tlatin1) and you can view manual pages in both C,
your_locale and your_locale.UTF-8. Done, and you are lucky.
III) If your locale is a Japanese or Korean one, go away. LFS doesn't
provide you with working groff. man-1.x assumes Debian-patched groff
here because of -Tnippon. Or, be sure to delete all Japanese and Korean
manual pages, and English ones will be presented to you instead.
IV) NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -Tlatin -mandoc | /usr/bin/iconv -f OLDCHARSET
where OLDCHARSET is the charset in which manual pages for your language
are stored on disk (i.e. KOI8-R should be written instead of OLDCHARSET
for viewing Russian manual pages). Yes, this is a gross hack. Here groff
is fooled into thinking that the manual page and the output are in
ISO-8859-1 (so that no conversions take place in groff), and the
trailing iconv pipe converts from the translator's charset to the user's
one. It is a no-op in non-UTF-8 locales where those two are in fact the
same.
--
Alexander E. Patrakov
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