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

[Russ Allbery]

Dominique Dumont <dod at debian.org> writes:
> On Friday, 18 November 2016 09:34:03 CET Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Guillem did some more investigation, and sadly it turns out that raw
>> UTF-8 in man pages continues to break even completely current man
>> implementations on platforms like macOS.

> That's a constraint we do not have on Debian/unstable.

> Considering [1], we may want to patch Debian's perl to produce utf8 man
> pages even if upstream cannot, due to portability constraints.

That's not strictly true, which is the reason why I haven't already
switched Linux systems over to generating UTF-8 by default.  This means
that you cannot create man pages with pod2man on a Linux system and have
them work on any other system, something that pod2man has, up until this
point, always guaranteed.

This will break some uses of pod2man.  It's not uncommon for people to
write man pages in POD even for non-Perl packages, and ship release
tarballs with pregenerated man pages so that the installer doesn't have to
have Perl locally.  If those contain UTF-8, this will result in man pages
in the release tarball that aren't portable.

It may well be that this is acceptable breakage (I'm pretty much convinced
that it is), but it's not a decision with zero drawbacks.

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