Matthew Burgess wrote:
Alexander, do you have time to submit this upstream and track its
progress? The header says that it "Adjusts installation of manual
pages to meet Man-DB expectations.". I assume it mentions "Man-DB"
specficially, simply because that's our implementation of `man' at the
moment, but in fact, the paths need to be changed for any/all known
implementations of `man' as per your comments at the end of
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-dev/2006-August/057918.html?
Already did this, proposing to add the
--with-translated-manpages=[utf8|8bit] configure switch. Summary follows.
1) Bram said that my comment at
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-dev/2006-August/057918.html
is Linux specific and doesn't apply to, e.g., FreeBSD and Solaris.
2) That's why the original proposal to modify the installation was rejected.
3) I have sent Bram a pointer to man-i18n.txt explaining the situation
with Linux, got this in the reply: "I'm not going to adjust Vim for
broken tools that CAN be fixed". But the hint makes it clear that RIGHT
NOW they are not fixed (by "fixed", Bram meant "look into
/usr/share/man/language.encoding").
4) Then I suggested not installing translated manual pages at all, on
the basis of "don't trigger the bug if you don't want to work around the
brokenness".
5) Then I reported that FreeBSD 5.3 (yes, I know that's ancient) indeed
looks into that path, but doesn't format manual pages properly in
ru_RU.UTF-8 locale. So the problem "installation of translated manual
pages doesn't meet OS standards" is not Linux-specific.
6) We concluded that a configure-time test how the OS handles manual
pages is indeed needed. Bram insists that the configure script must
always guess the setup correctly, but for me to implement this, ssh
accounts on non-Linux systems (just to scp a few manual pages into my
home directory and look at them) are needed.
7) FreeBSD 6.1 and Solaris Express 7/06 are already tested, but reports
are not sent yet. FreeBSD 6.1 behaves exactly as 5.3 (cannot be
configured to display Russian manual pages correctly in ru_RU.UTF-8, but
works correctly by default in ru_RU.KOI8-R), and Solaris Express doesn't
look for translated manual pages by default (but formats them according
to the current locale if they are explicitly added to MANPATH). These
tests do invalidate my initial list of options
(--with-translated-manpages=[utf8|8bit]), I need to test more systems to
determine the complete list of quirks.
8) I am very busy now with the classroom. Instead of writing this mail,
I should have spent my time writing a simpler replacement for LDAP
Account Manager that would eliminate errors that account operators make
in 75% of cases, despite the detailed instruction on the wall. The
deadline is September, 4.
--
Alexander E. Patrakov
--
http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev
FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/
Unsubscribe: See the above information page