Outdated policy text on Man-DB page

[alexander@…]

Man-DB page says:

LFS uses the same conventions as Debian. This was chosen because Man-DB does not understand man pages stored in UTF-8. And, for our purposes, Man-DB is preferable to Man as it works without extra configuration in any locale. Lastly, as of now, there is no fully-working implementation of the RedHat convention. RedHat's groff is known to misformat text.

As of Fedora 8, RedHat groff doesn't misformat manual pages, so the last two sentences have at least to be reworded to mention that the situation they describe was in effect when UTF-8 support was first added into LFS, not "as of now". And Fedora's patched man and groff do work (with one issue easily fixable by compiling man with "+lang none") without extra configuration in any locale. Lastly, Man-DB-2.5.0 does understand UTF-8 manual pages (by converting them on the fly to a 8-bit encoding before processing by Groff) if they are placed in a file with a name such as /usr/share/man/ru.UTF-8/man5/manpage.5.

However, implementing RedHat model as in RedHat means:

• two heavily-patched packages instead of one,
• converting all manual pages in BLFS to UTF-8 (not a doable task),
• groff still uses hacks not welcome by upstream,
• man (non-db) is still dead upstream.

So, until Groff-2.0 comes out, the Debian implementation should stay in LFS, possibly with "convert UTF-8 manual pages to a 8-bit encoding in the table" instruction changed to "place UTF-8 manual pages appropriately" (or present this as an alternative to conversion, which still works).

[DJ Lucas]

See ​http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-dev/2008-September/061646.html for even more details from man-db maintainer Colin Watson.

[DJ Lucas]

Excellent analysis William. Thank you very much for this. The GDBM change will have to wait. While BerkelyDB is overkill for man-db, adding another package to the base is not desirable, but a swap of packages is very desirable. We'll need to see if we can kill arpd in iproute2 again (or if somebody has hacked it up to use GDBM). Perl also will utilize BerkelyDB, but I don't know what it is for, or if GDBM can replace BDB's functionality for Perl.

[DJ Lucas]

​http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-dev/2005-December/054887.html

Going back to BDB's inclusion, I'm not so sure that GDBM over BerkelyDB is "very desirable," though it is the preferred choice of the man-db developer(s). Perl will use either/or/both. Nothing on arpd.

[DJ Lucas]

Fixed in r8694.

[DJ Lucas]

Reopening due to continuing review on LFS-Dev.

[DJ Lucas]

Fixed in r8698.