* On [03 Sep 2005 17:46 +0300] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> FHS just makes no sense here. Yes, it says:
> 
> [quote]
> Systems which use a unique language and code set for all manual pages 
> may omit the <locale> substring and store all manual pages in <mandir>.
> [/quote]
> 
> And it mentions /usr/share/man/en which is not present on Debian Sarge 
> and not in Fedora Core 2. 

True, I haven't seen the /usr/share/man/en used on any distro I've used.

> Additionally, neither unpatched "man" nor "man-db" look there.

[...]

> You also have to patch "man" so that it falls back to English manual
> pages properly.

I have to say that I hadn't thought about what man would fall back to
if it couldn't find the man page. So I had to try it:

>From /etc/man.conf

# Certain versions of the FHS recommend putting formatted versions of
# /usr/.../share/man/[locale/]manx/page.x into
# /var/cache/man/.../[locale/]catx/page.x.
# The keyword FHS will cause this behaviour (and overrides FSSTND).

So by uncommenting the FHS keyword and moving English man pages to
man/en I could do the following:

$ export LC_ALL=en_US
$ man passwd

gives a man page in English

$ export LC_ALL=de_DE
$ man passwd

man page in German, however,

$ man man

doesn't work since there isn't a German man page for man and man falls
back to searching it's path, including /usr/share/man, but can't find
anything. However, by adding

MANPATH        /usr/share/man/en

to the man path in /etc/man.conf, it now works and man/en becomes the
fallback!

Character sets and man pages are another interesting topic. It would be
ideal if all man pages can be converted to UTF-8 but I don't know about
the practically of that.

Tarek

-- 
"One who knows that enough is enough will always have enough." - Lao 
Tzu (570? B.C.-490 B.C.)
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