New personal experimental book

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

DJ Lucas wrote:
> All the recently mentioned changes and updates have been made except for
> the testsuite fixes that Robert has been working on as I haven't had the
> time to do manual builds.  Of note:  GCC-4.3.2, GlibC-2.8-20080905, LSB
> bootscripts, initd-tools introduced, man instead of mandb and added
> groff-utf8 package (thanks Ken).  Man is probably still a little broken

Yes, it is. Please read the man-i18n.txt hint and pass +lang none to man in 
order to get readable error messages. And, groff-1.19.2 doesn't have 
the --enable-multibyte configure switch.

And in fact I would strongly prefer a 8-line patch to Man to ignore 
non-English manual pages completely (instead of unconfigured groff-utf8 and 
hard-coded special-casing Japanese in Man-1.6f in a way that works only with 
Debian-patched Groff), as it saves the editors from all the encoding 
validation work. This is rather trivial, as it involves only removing stuff 
from the add_to_mandirlist() function (because of the check in 
is_lang_page(), this also disables the Japanese special-case logic that 
doesn't make sense with any modern groff). Remember: an English message (i.e, 
error message or manpage) is infinitely better than an unreadable one.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov