From ab416d4275a3d3bc53cd3b979637e4b22a552fd1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: cjwatson <> Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:57:51 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] UTF-8 manual pages --- 2008-01-29-utf-8-manual-pages.txt | 32 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 32 insertions(+) create mode 100644 2008-01-29-utf-8-manual-pages.txt diff --git a/2008-01-29-utf-8-manual-pages.txt b/2008-01-29-utf-8-manual-pages.txt new file mode 100644 index 00000000..3b5e9214 --- /dev/null +++ b/2008-01-29-utf-8-manual-pages.txt @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +UTF-8 manual pages + +

See + +Encodings in man-db for context.

+ +

Yesterday, I uploaded + +man-db 2.5.1-1 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 + +automatically recode manual pages to UTF-8.

+ +

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 +policy +amendment.

+ +

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 +working +on. +After that, we can reasonably claim to have dragged manual pages kicking and +screaming into the 21st century.

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