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
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