Alexander E. Patrakov wrote: > DJ Lucas wrote: > >> Many other distributions ignore the problem >> completely, leaving the end user with a mix of readable and >> unreadable manual pages, and even worse yet, unreadable error >> messages when a suitable manual page is not found. >> > > "ignore the problem" => which problem? The text suggests that many > distributions ignore that fact that different distributions have > different policies. Some other word is needed. Maybe: "Many other > distributions ignore the need for a consistent policy, leaving the user > with ..."? > > "a mix of readable and unreadable manual pages" - yes, very well > spotted, better than I formulated on this list! However, there is a very > low-priority wish: some people will misinterpret the word "unreadable" > as "no way to make the man program access this file" instead of "man > reads this file and displays garbage". Here a picture would be worth > thousand words, but pictures are not in the current LFS tradition. > > "and, even worse yet, unreadable error messages" => no, unreadable pages > are worse. And this situation follows from a bug in the "man" program > (it uses the obsolete catgets interface instead of gettext), not from > misplaced or misencoded manual pages, so let's not mention it. > > Many other distributions ignore the on disk encodings completely, leaving the end user with a mix of improperly encoded manual pages. When man encounters an unexpected encoding, it will display the contents as configured, resulting in completely illegible text.
>> Man-DB uses a >> built-in table (see below) to find the correct serach directory for >> manual pages based on the user's locale settings. >> > > No, it doesn't look into the table in this case. See add_nls_manpath() > in http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/bzr/man-db/trunk/src/manp.c > > It iterates over all subdirectories and tests whether the subdirectory > is for the user's language, completely disregarding the encoding. > ...ships with manual pages in legacy encodings. Man-DB uses a built-in table (see below) to determine the on disk encoding of the manual pages found for a user's locale. If the directories found do not contain the ".UTF-8" extension, Man-DB checks the table, and performs the necessary conversion. E.g., because of "UTF-8" in the directory name... -- DJ Lucas -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content, and is believed to be clean. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
