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

[Niko Tyni]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 12:16:49PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Dominique Dumont <dod at debian.org> writes:
> 
> > Looks like I was not clear. I was thinking of patching perl build system
> > to generate perl* man page (perlrun perlunicook...) as utf8 man page.
> 
> > That should not impact the generation of other man pages (i.e. not in
> > Debian perl package) using pod2man.
> 
> Oh, yes.  I thought that had already been done at some point by forcing
> the build system to pass -u, but possibly not.  I'm not sure how hard that
> is to do.

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.

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.

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.)
-- 
Niko