On May 24, 2016, at 5:55 AM, Tim Ruehsen wrote: > Hi Karl, > > thanks for pointing out those issue(s). > >> Perl... Exactly which version does not matter. > > It matters. AFAICS, Perl 5.8 introduced UTF-8 in 2002. > So perhaps your system is even older !? > (Just out of curiosity, what is it ?)
MacPorts users observed this problem with Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", which was released in 2009. https://trac.macports.org/ticket/50164 We addressed it by using a newer pod2man installed by MacPorts instead of the older one included with OS X. > That lets me ask why are you sticking around with old software *and* at the > same time you try to build latest software (at least wget). Some users dislike the user interface changes Apple made in OS X 10.7 and later and stick with 10.6 by choice. Others have older computers incapable of running newer versions of OS X, or they believe the performance of their computer will be adversely affected by upgrading to newer versions of OS X. Nevertheless, they may wish to install software like wget that's not included with the OS. Requiring a newer pod2man is not terrible, and for users using a package manager is not an inconvenience if the package maintainer added the right dependencies. However, I don't disagree with Karl that including pre-generated manpages in the source tarball might be reasonable, just as it is reasonable to pre-generate the configure script and Makefiles. Also, I am in favor of configure-time checks for the capabilities you need. If you need pod2man to support --utf8, I would expect the configure script to check for that and bail with a helpful error message (e.g. recommending upgrading the perl installation), rather than failing at build time.
