Hi, Thank you for sharing a problem, Clytie. :-)
From: Clytie Siddall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Please keep an eye on manpage encoding issues (especially in etch). Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2006 17:06:40 +1030 > On 12/11/2006, at 3:48 PM, Kobayashi Noritada wrote: > > > > > >>> Manpage encoding issues are seen for some packages and for some > >>> languages; some manpages are encoded in UTF-8 and unreadable in any > >>> environment. > >> > >> Can we specify the encoding in the manpage text in some way? > > > > No, the input encoding is determined by the locale and input manpage > > path, which is hard-coded in man-db's src/encodings.c. > > :( > > Users of some languages, like mine, will need UTF8 anyway, and will > set their man conf correspondingly. In any case, UTF8 will be used > increasingly. It is, or should be, the standard encoding for > internationalization. Yes, exactly I think so. I hear Fedora have forced manpages to be encoded in UTF-8 and Debian should do so in the future, or at least support UTF-8 manpages for languages that have used non-UTF8 ones in some way (e.g. by detecting input encodings, or by completely switching to UTF-8). However, completely switching manpage encodings to UTF-8 will require both modification of man-db's encoding handling and conversion of all the old non-UTF8 manpages (e.g. EUC-JP ones used for Japanese, and latin-1 ones used for European languages), which will be a big transition and will be controversial. Actually it was controversial at least in a thread[1] starting from my post in this April in a Japanese list. So, in the first mail, I proposed determining some policy about encodings of manpages and creating system to check manpage encodings in the future. After that, or in parallel, we should do some transition or support. > But meanwhile, we need a way to label non-UTF8 manpages, or manpages > which don't match the man conf encoding setting. Bruno, what do you Yes, a number of non-UTF8 manpages are now used for many languages for which only non-UTF8 ones are approved. And at least for etch, we now need conversion of UTF-8 manpages for those languages. [1] http://lists.debian.or.jp/debian-users/200604/threads.html#00078 (in Japanese) Thanks, -nori -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
