RFC: Man-DB UTF-8 support fix

[Ken Moffat]

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 09:10:56AM -0600, Matthew Burgess wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> At http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~matthew/lfs_man_db_fix/chapter06/man-db.html
> you can see the results of my attempt at fixing #2379
> (http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/ticket/2379).
> 
> I'd appreciate review of that page to check that it is accurate.  The changes
> from http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/development/chapter06/man-db.html
> include:
> 
> 1) Removal of the convert-mans script.  Man-DB should just do the right thing
>    now.
> 2) Removal of the discussion of what other distributions support as I judged
>    it to be largely irrelevant and confusing given the much simplified
>    setup we can now adopt
> 3) Updated the encoding table to match what Man-DB-2.5.5 languages now supports
>    and removed the now outdated list of languages it doesn't support.
 I was going to say "nice work" for the table, but checking it
against src/encodings.c I note that Ukrainian should be KOI8-U not
-R.  Sorry to carp ;-)

 I was also going to say that the warning seemed a bit harsh, and
that only _legacy_ encodings not listed are unsupported, but I had
slightly odd results copying a UTF-8 page to uz_UZ, adding in the
cyrillic and latin from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/uzbek.htm
and adding some random UTF-8 accented versions of the letter 'a'
(cyrillic mostly rendered as latin, which was weird, some of the
non-latin1 accents dropped to give just 'a') so I guess it is
technically correct.  In any case, translations of man pages in
other languages are hard to find.

[ A more relevant language to me, gd_GB, seems to work as UTF-8
but it only uses latin1 characters. ]

> 4) Added a 'make check' command, as Man-DB now comes with a test suite.  This
>    currently fails 8 out of 9 of the test though, with the following message:
> 
>    FAIL: col: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character
> 
>    So this may get dropped before the commit is made.

Matt, please add

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/patches/downloads/man-db/man-db-2.5.5-fix_testsuite-1.patch

 When I tried it, it appeared to fix all the issues, but I'd feel
happier if it was tested in a build.  I did hide col when I tested
it, but I also make mistakes - on my latest build (clfs using gdbm
and man-db) I forgot to use the patch :-(

 Tapadh leat air an obair seo (literally, 'thanks for this work').

ĸen
-- 
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce