Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
Or, better, drop the UTF-8 support completely from LFS. It is
unmaintainable, and in fact not ready in "vanilla upstream". This also
means dropping Nautilus CD Burner from BLFS.
I realise that was in <troll> markers, but still, I have to disagree.
Part of my motivation for documenting the statuses of our patches is
exactly so that, by ensuring those patches are submitted, "vanilla
upstream" will work correctly in UTF-8 locales and folks (including book
editors) won't have to worry about i18n at all - it'll Just Work.
Actually, there are two problems.
1) Man forgets to recode its output from the translator's charset to the
user's locale charset. Thus, error messages are readable only in
traditional 8-bit locales. Workaround for the current version of Man:
configure with "+lang none". Work is in progress to implement this
conversion. I have no access to the source code of development versions
of Man, but the result will be shown to me when it is ready.
OK, I guess that's progress of sorts.
2) We still need to decide on a configuration file format, so that none
of the existing configurations are broken, but that the possibility of
integrating Man into UTF-8 systems currently using Man-DB is gained.
Why is a configuration file needed at all? Is this because, IIUC,
man-pages don't store their character encodings anywhere, therefore we
need to tell groff and man what encodings we need to translate between?
If so, that sucks, but I guess there's not much we can do about it
(save from translating all man pages to UTF-8, but that's infeasible
when it comes to BLFS, I guess).
In an ideal world, how would you go about being able to view both UTF-8
and non-UTF-8 man pages? I'm thinking it should be:
1) `groff` with -K support and
2) `man` that remembers to recode its output from the translator's
charset to the user's locale charset.
If that's correct, I think we should seriously consider dropping the
existing configuration and implement the above, regardless of whether it
requires patches backported from upstream. At least then, when upstream
eventually do release packages that support both UTF-8 and non-UTF-8 man
pages all we have to do is upgrade to those releases and drop the patches.
And that's really bad as we obviously miss out on any bug fixes made
in groff-1.19.x. For example, CVE-2004-0969 was fixed in 1.19.2!
And in Debian too! Just follow their patch :)
Ah, you mean the patch that's currently in the book? If so that's good
news.
Thanks,
Matt.
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