Matthew Burgess wrote:
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?
Partially correct. Also, one condition that is imposed on the
implementation is that it must not break existing setups. This is
exactly the main complication: we need to support old-style NROFF lines.
It would be also nice to avoid having two (old and new) programs in one.
In an ideal world, how would you go about being able to view both UTF-8
and non-UTF-8 man pages?
RedHat checks whether a manual page is in UTF-8 (by running iconv -f
UTF-8 -t UTF-8), and treats it differently according to the result. But
I am not going to have this time-sucking kludge in LFS, because having
both UTF-8 and non-UTF-8 manual pages on disk is a configuration error
that is worked around by RedHat.
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.
This is not a feasible backport. I am afraid we will have to create a
CVS snapshot.
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.
As I already mentioned, having both UTF-8 and non-UTF-8 manual pages on
disk is a configuration error.
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.
Yes. BTW, upgrading to the latest version of the Debian patch also fixes
the C++ issue.
--
Alexander E. Patrakov
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