Bug#840211: perlunicook man page does not display utf8 char beyond ascii

[Russ Allbery]

Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> writes:

> No, I don't think we've ever done that. I think it *should* be as simple
> as patching ./installman to pass utf8 => 1 to Pod::Man (the Perl build
> system doesn't use pod2man itself). There might be some issues with
> cross-building but that's not really supported anyway.

Yeah, I think we're at the point where we should just go ahead and do this.

> ISTR old concerns about Debian systems sharing manual pages (via NFS
> I guess) to other platforms with incompatible nroff implementations.
> But that seems like a silly corner case that we shouldn't care about.

Right, I'm pretty dubious that anyone is going to be doing this these
days, since package managers make this so much easier.  At the least, I
doubt anyone will be doing it with incompatible systems that aren't using
man-db.

> I think my only problem with this is that upstreaming it properly would
> be somewhat difficult due to the incompatibilities noted here. I suppose
> I shouldn't let that be a blocker. Dominic, any opinion?

> (Possibly a manual Configure option like -Dmanutf8, maybe even
> enabled by default on Linux, would be acceptable upstream. No idea how
> an automatic Configure probe for the UTF8 compatibility would work.)

The upstreaming part is really my fault, since I've been intending for
ages to start a thread on pod-people and perl5-porters about the best
approach in general but haven't gotten to it (or, more to the point,
haven't made sure I had the resources to participate in the thread and act
on the results).  This is definitely on my to-do list to do.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>