Hi Ted,
Ted Unangst wrote on Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 12:42:20PM -0500:
> On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 14:02, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
>> I even considered switching the mandoc(1) default from -Tascii to
>> -Tlocale in general, but forgot about it again. If you like the
>> idea, that would be something to do after unlock; it might require
>> explicitly giving the -Tascii option in some build system and similar
>> contexts.
>>
>> I think -Tlocale might be a saner default than -Tascii nowadays.
>> People who don't want UTF-8 shouldn't have it in their LC_CTYPE,
>> and it's hard to see why people who do want it and have it in their
>> LC_CTYPE should be forced to give -Tlocale or something similar
>> to each and every utility they call.
> Inclined to agree, but I wanted to try the conservative approach for
> this release.
I fully understand that, and i'm not strongly opposed to your less
intrusive suggestion, not even to putting it in before the release.
However there are two (weak) reasons why you might decide to wait
even with this less intrusive step, anyway.
1. I asked around a bit and Thomas Klausner (NetBSD) mentioned
that both groff and mandoc format bare, unescaped ASCII minus
characters (`-', 0x2d) found in the input stream as the
three-byte UTF-8 sequence 0xe2 0x80 0x93 in the output stream
when running with -Tutf8 or with -Tlocale and LC_CTYPE=*_*.UTF-8.
That can be annoying when trying to copy and paste code examples
from formatted manual pages. Maybe we should not rush this in
but allow more time to decide whether we dislike that quick
and maybe devise mitigations. More similar issues might hide
under some rocks in the vicinity.
2. If we hope to switch the mandoc default anyway, switching
/etc/man.conf back and forth in the process maybe just
gratuitiously exercises sysmerge(8) on people's machines.
> I don't know how many places the output of mandoc is
> saved for later.
Few, probably, because mandoc(1) is fast enough that we run in on
demand whenever possible and usually avoid preformatting anything
during builds, or where we do preformat, we use groff for that, anyway.
But even missing one single instance that is hiding somewhere
would just be pointless disruption in a release.
Yours,
Ingo
