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).
