UTF-8 manual pages

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+UTF-8 manual pages
+
+<p>See
+<a href="http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~cjwatson/blosxom/2007-09-17-man-db-encodings.html">
+Encodings in man-db</a> for context.</p>
+
+<p>Yesterday, I uploaded
+<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2008/01/msg02665.html">
+man-db 2.5.1-1</a> to unstable. With this version, not only is it possible
+to install manual pages in UTF-8 (as with 2.5.0, although with fewer bugs),
+but it's also possible to ask man to produce a version of an arbitrary page
+in the encoding of your choice, and have it guess the source encoding for
+you fairly reliably. This finally provides enough support to have debhelper
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=462937">
+automatically recode manual pages to UTF-8</a>.</p>
+
+<p>It'll probably take a little while to shake out the corner-case bugs, but
+I'm generally pretty happy with this. Once the new man-db and debhelper land
+in testing, I'll send a note to debian-devel-announce and push harder on my
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=440420">policy
+amendment</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Considering the historical state of man-db when it comes to localisation,
+and all of the dependencies and general yak-shaving that had to be tackled
+to get here, this represents the end of probably several hundred hours of
+work, so I'm pretty happy that this is out the door. The only remaining step
+is to add UTF-8 input support to groff, which fortunately Brian M. Carlson
+is
+<a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2007-11/msg00018.html">working</a>
+<a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2008-01/msg00004.html">on</a>.
+After that, we can reasonably claim to have dragged manual pages kicking and
+screaming into the 21st century.</p>