Bug#440420: [PROPOSAL] Manual page encoding

[Jens Seidel <jensseidel@users.sf.net>]

Hi Colin,

it becomes now slightly off topic but let me reply a last time to this
bug report.

On Mon, Sep 03, 2007 at 01:11:04PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 03, 2007 at 08:30:39AM +0200, Jens Seidel wrote:
> Vietnamese is an odd case. In the long term, I think being explicit
> (vi.UTF-8) is the right answer anyway.
 
OK.

> I'm not sure how to word this in policy though; do you have any
> suggestions?

How about:

"It is therefore not yet recommended to install UTF-8 encoded pages if a
classical encoding can be used instead, but rather to continue using the
legacy encoding."
 
> Maybe it would be better for me to just focus on getting man-db 2.5.0
> done ASAP and not worry too much about policy in the meantime. :-)

Right :-)
 
> That Bulgarian page is a particularly unfortunate example because it
> uses the ѝ character which is not in CP1251 (the encoding of the bg_BG

Hm, OK. Bulgarian is very similar to Russian so I really wondered that
it wasn't supported. charsets(7) mentions the 8859-5 encoding for
Bulgarian but I wrongly assumed this manpage documents valid man file
encodings :-)

> locale), so right now we have no reliable path to render this page. I've
> added Bulgarian support anyway, it's just that this page will be a bit

Thanks. 

> broken. I think you would be best advised to move this page to
> /usr/share/man/bg.UTF-8 given that it definitely won't work in

OK, will do so. But as dh_installman doesn't support it yet I need to do
it manually (not a big task).

> /usr/share/man/bg.
> 
> In the case of the Vietnamese page, please change the "—" character
> (U+2014) to "\-" as is standard in NAME sections; otherwise this works

Oops, Clytie used a Unicode character and Lintian or po4a did not
complained :-( I will file a bug against Lintian ...

> fine when recoded via TCVN5712-1 so I've added support for this too.

Great, but I think TCVN5712-1 is not supported by po4a as output
encoding.

> Again, I think you would be best advised to install this in
> /usr/share/man/vi.UTF-8.

Thanks, I will do so.

It's really nice that we will have soon a first Bulgarian manpage in
Debian. There are probably also not more Vietnamese pages installed.

Thanks, again
Jens