Bug#941980: pod2man: Please convert zero-width space (u200B) to \:

[Russ Allbery]

Russ Allbery <rra at debian.org> writes:
> Jean-Michel Vourgère <nirgal at debian.org> writes:

>> I'm using pod to generate man files in package rrdtool.

>> I had an issue with long man lines such as:
>> B<DEF:>I<E<lt>vnameE<gt>>=I<E<lt>rrdfileE<gt>>:I<E<lt>ds-nameE<gt>>:I<E<lt>CFE<gt>>[:step=I<E<lt>stepE<gt>>][:start=I<E<lt>timeE<gt>>][:end=I<E<lt>timeE<gt>>][:reduce=I<E<lt>B<CF>E<gt>>][:daemon=I<E<lt>addressE<gt>>]
>> that results lintian "manpage-has-errors-from-man": can't break line.

>> That I fixed that by inserting unicode zero-width-space characters 200B:
>> B<DEF:>I<E<lt>vnameE<gt>>=I<E<lt>rrdfileE<gt>>:I<E<lt>ds-nameE<gt>>:I<E<lt>CFE<gt>>[:step=I<E<lt>stepE<gt>>][:start=I<E<lt>timeE<gt>>]E<0x200B>[:end=I<E<lt>timeE<gt>>]E<0x200B>[:reduce=I<E<lt>B<CF>E<gt>>]E<0x200B>[:daemon=I<E<lt>addressE<gt>>]

>> I expected pod2man to generate the corect \: escape sequence, but it
>> did not.

[...]

> Unfortunately, \: appears to be a groff extension as far as I can tell.
> It's at least not mentioned in CSTR 54, nor in other older documentation
> I can find for the *roff language.  That means this gets entangled in
> the general design constraint that pod2man tries to produce portable
> *roff output that's not specific to groff.

> I'm not certain this is fully correct because unfortunately it's very
> difficult to search for \: to get more data.

Many years later, I have incorporated this change in podlators 5.00, just
now released.  It will still be a bit before that's incorporated into Perl
and thus into the Debian Perl packages, but I wanted to let you know that
this fix is properly in progress.

I went ahead and did the conversion to \: unconditionally since it's
documented in the mandoc roff reference as well as groff.  That covers
nearly all modern platforms.  It may still not work on a few older nroff
implementations like Solaris or AIX, but this case is obscure enough and
enough other things related to Unicode don't work there anyway that I
don't think it should cause any serious problems.

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