[LFS Trac] #2120: Outdated policy text on Man-DB page

[LFS Trac]

#2120: Outdated policy text on Man-DB page
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 Reporter:  alexander at linuxfromscratch.org  |       Owner:  lfs-book at linuxfromscratch.org
     Type:  defect                          |      Status:  new                          
 Priority:  normal                          |   Milestone:  7.0                          
Component:  Book                            |     Version:  SVN                          
 Severity:  normal                          |    Keywords:                               
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 Man-DB page says:

     LFS uses the same conventions as Debian. This was chosen because Man-
 DB does not understand man pages stored in UTF-8. And, for our purposes,
 Man-DB is preferable to Man as it works without extra configuration in any
 locale. Lastly, as of now, there is no fully-working implementation of the
 RedHat convention. RedHat's groff is known to misformat text.


 As of Fedora 8, RedHat groff doesn't misformat manual pages, so the last
 two sentences have at least to be reworded to mention that the situation
 they describe was in effect when UTF-8 support was first added into LFS,
 not "as of now". And Fedora's patched man and groff do work (with one
 issue easily fixable by compiling man with "+lang none") without extra
 configuration in any locale. Lastly, Man-DB-2.5.0 does understand UTF-8
 manual pages (by converting them on the fly to a 8-bit encoding before
 processing by Groff) if they are placed in a file with a name such as
 /usr/share/man/ru.UTF-8/man5/manpage.5.

 However, implementing RedHat model as in RedHat means:
  * two heavily-patched packages instead of one,
  * converting all manual pages in BLFS to UTF-8 (not a doable task),
  * groff still uses hacks not welcome by upstream,
  * man (non-db) is still dead upstream.

 So, until Groff-2.0 comes out, the Debian implementation should stay in
 LFS, possibly with "convert UTF-8 manual pages to a 8-bit encoding in the
 table" instruction changed to "place UTF-8 manual pages appropriately" (or
 present this as an alternative to conversion, which still works).

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/ticket/2120>
LFS Trac <http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/>
Linux From Scratch: Your Distro, Your Rules.