Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
Matthew Burgess wrote:

Coreutils Internationalization Fixes - Fixes various bugs with multibyte character support
>>
No, no action required. Such big patches should be treated as "switching to a fork", not as regular patches. Coreutils upstream is already aware of the patch and the problems it fixes, and validly rejected it as badly coded.

In which case, I seriously think we should drop the patch. I know it will cause regressions compared to the 6.2 release, but if we can write a "known bugs" page for issues like this (pointing to upstream bug reports) at least folks will know what does and doesn't work.

Another big problem with such big patches is that they often prevent upgrading package versions.

Yep, that's a particular concern of mine too.

Grep Redhat Fixes - Various fixes from Redhat's Grep package including i18n related fixes.
>
No action required. We follow RedHat's version of Grep. If upstream releases a new version, we wait for RedHat action and import their new patch.

I disagree. If upstream release a new version, we should switch to that and wait for bug reports to come in against the vanilla upstream version. We then forward those bug reports upstream (assuming they're not caused by incorrect build instructions, of course).

Groff Debian Fixes - Adds the ascii8 and nippon devices to groff, which are required for man-db. - I can only assume this hasn't been submitted upstream as Groff-1.19 was released without it having been applied. - We could fix `man' so that it can handle i18n man-pages so that we don't need man-db and therefore, presumably, this patch. Or we could submit this patch upstream.

Rejected as a bad hack. Upstream now has Unicode-aware Groff in CVS, using a completely different approach. Thus, the patch is obsolete, but must stay in LFS (and groff must not be upgraded in LFS) until a compatible version of Man appears.

Is it just CVS Groff that is Unicode-aware, or is groff-1.19.2 Unicode-aware? NEWS for 1.19.2 states that `grotty' gained "Experimental support for zero-width and double-width characters". I don't see anything Unicode related in NEWS or CHANGES in groff's CVS repository (http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/groff/).

In fact, the current version of Man can be made compatible with Groff CVS, but this means either a very long "Man configuration" page in LFS (that's why I switched to Man-DB)

Is this just because Man has a poor default configuration? If so, perhaps a patch could be submitted upstream to improve its out of the box defaults. IIRC though, the issue is that 'man' simply doesn't know what the correct configuration is for various locales and doesn't have a mechanism for storing them. If that's correct, the patch is likely to be a lot more involved as it'll be a new feature, obviously.

Note that the Man-DB is compatible _only_ with Debian-patched Groff-1.18.1.1, not any later version.

And that's really bad as we obviously miss out on any bug fixes made in groff-1.19.x. For example, CVE-2004-0969 was fixed in 1.19.2!

Thanks for your help, Alexander.

Regards,

Matt.

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