DJ Lucas wrote: > Ken Moffat wrote: > > Of the 'not so liked', I'd be happy to see the back of Man-DB (and > > therefore move Berkeley DB back to BLFS - if my memory is correct, it > > was a dependency of Man-DB). In my own builds, I still use groff-utf8 > > to render UTF-8 man-pages. [ nostalgic memory: before shadow was > > orphaned and then taken over by debian, it used to have a nice > > selection of UTF-8 pages. ] > > I really do not have a good understanding of that particular issue. > From what I did catch, and taking only info from the Debian bug, is > that we gain proper support for Japanese, and some broken support for > Chinese and Korean with ManDB. I really wish Alexander could chime in > here since he is the most knowledgeable WRT to this issue. For > reference: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=196762 .
I don't use anything except Debian now (i.e., have no LFS) and don't follow the upstream development (was too busy with my PhD, and now I am looking for a new job). So, I can't give any up-to-date advice. The last information that I posess is: 1) There must be consistency!!! And this requirement will never change. I.e., it shouldn't happen that some packages install UTF-8 manual pages and some install 8-bit manual pages. While consistency is not normally a problem, it is a huge problem for the huge BLFS book to change from one consistent scheme to another. For this reason alone, I don't recommend any changes. 2) Man-DB can be built with gdbm which is much more lightweight than BDB (and that is how it is built in Debian). 3) Man-1.6f still uses the obsolete catgets() system for message translation and thus outputs garbage instead of error messages in UTF-8 locales. So, if LFS goes to Man, it should completely disable translations of man error messages by passing "+lang none". 4) Groff CVS can read UTF-8 manual pages (at least for Ruissian, no idea about CJK) and produce UTF-8 output if started with "-Tutf8 -K UTF-8", but in traditional 8-bit locales one needs the output in the user's 8-bit charset, not UTF-8. > In skimming through the groff archives 200801-current, > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/ , it doesn't look like anything > has happened in CVS for CJK support. ManDB with the debian groff patch > is the only solution for Japanese. Chinese and Korean are still in the > dark even with that. I guess my real question is what exactly do we > loose by dropping back to Man with current groff-1.19.2. I do realize > that what we have now works well in most cases. If you really want to stick with the current stable versions of Man and Groff and have the possibility to choose or not choose UTF-8 locales, then please implement the method from the "5. WHEN EVERYTHING WORKS BY DEFAULT" section, i.e., remove _all_ translated manual pages from all packages in LFS and BLFS and/or patch Man not to look for them at all. This is the only "right" thing to do now, because such support is based on either obsolete standards (ISO-8859-1) or, even worse, hacks. This will also serve better for the readers, as in many packages the translations of manual pages are horribly outdated. -- Alexander E. Patrakov -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
