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

[Diederik de Haas]

Hi Russ,

On Sat, 26 Nov 2022 08:47:59 -0800 Russ Allbery <rra at debian.org> wrote:
> 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 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.

$ aptitude show podlators-perl
No candidate version found for podlators-perl
Package: podlators-perl
State: not a real package
Provided by: perl (5.32.1-4+deb11u1), perl (5.32.1-4+deb11u2), perl (5.36.0-7)

Does this mean that this bug is fixed in Stable and Testing/Unstable now?

Cheers,
  Diederik
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