DJ Lucas wrote: > OK. But I am still under the impression that is the expected future. > That doesn't change the fact that it is totally incorrect as written and > needs to corrected to show the proper state.
Well, Debian certainly won't switch to UTF-8 manual pages until they release Lenny. And, judging by their graph of release-critical bugs, this will happen in 9-10 months or so. What they are doing right now is preparing the infrastructure: a viewer that understands UTF-8 encoded manual pages, a perl patch so that pod2man can produce them, in the future they plan to write dpkg helper scripts that actually convert manual pages at package creation time. Only after that, the switch becomes possible. However, if I were Debian, I would delay the switch even further. Right now, ISO-8859-1 manual pages can be converted to PostScript directly with Groff. By converting manual pages to UTF-8, you lose the ability to print them. Isn't printing a really important feature? ;) >>> Upstream packagers will very likely drop legacy encodings in favor of >>> UTF-8, though adoption has been slow due to the hacks required to >>> make the current Man and Groff packages work correctly together. >>> >> I don't know how to comment on this. Modern desktop packages come with >> DocBook documentation, not manual pages. >> > :-) The point of both of the above points is to make known that we will > be seeing more UTF-8 encoded manual pages...especially with both Debian > and RedHat going that route. It still needs rewording, or removal. I vote for removal, especially because MPlayer (a package under rapid development) still ships with non-UTF-8 manual pages. And while UTF-8 manual pages may be the future, the timeframe is not defined. > OK. I thought about doing that too, but French man pages include shell > scripts to do the conversion before installation so it's not a good > place to show off convert-mans. Why not? Mention that the equivalent scripts exist in the package, but that for the sake of demonstration, out "convert-mans" script is used. -- Alexander E. Patrakov -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
