On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 12:16:49PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Dominique Dumont <d...@debian.org> writes: > > > Looks like I was not clear. I was thinking of patching perl build system > > to generate perl* man page (perlrun perlunicook...) as utf8 man page. > > > That should not impact the generation of other man pages (i.e. not in > > Debian perl package) using pod2man. > > Oh, yes. I thought that had already been done at some point by forcing > the build system to pass -u, but possibly not. I'm not sure how hard that > is to do.
No, I don't think we've ever done that. I think it *should* be as simple as patching ./installman to pass utf8 => 1 to Pod::Man (the Perl build system doesn't use pod2man itself). There might be some issues with cross-building but that's not really supported anyway. ISTR old concerns about Debian systems sharing manual pages (via NFS I guess) to other platforms with incompatible nroff implementations. But that seems like a silly corner case that we shouldn't care about. I think my only problem with this is that upstreaming it properly would be somewhat difficult due to the incompatibilities noted here. I suppose I shouldn't let that be a blocker. Dominic, any opinion? (Possibly a manual Configure option like -Dmanutf8, maybe even enabled by default on Linux, would be acceptable upstream. No idea how an automatic Configure probe for the UTF8 compatibility would work.) -- Niko