[Reproducible-builds] [PATCH 2/2] DocBook: Use a fixed encoding for output

[Jonathan Corbet]

On Mon, 14 Sep 2015 01:32:50 +0100
Ben Hutchings <ben at decadent.org.uk> wrote:

> > I guess I have to ask, though: doesn't it seem that having the docs
> > produced according to the current locale is the Right Thing to do?  Users
> > have their locale set as it is for a reason, it seems like the production
> > of textual documents should respect their choice.
> > 
> > Am I missing something here?  
> 
> Yes - the locale's character encoding applies to plain text, but rich
> text formats can have a locale-independent encoding which the viewer
> will automatically to the current locale's encoding.
> 
> For HTML, the document encoding can be explicit in the document header
> (and is, in this case).
> 
> Manual pages were already consistently encoded in UTF-8, as this is the
> default behaviour of DocBook-XSL (and is what man-db prefers as input).
> 
> PDF and Postscript documents have arbitrary and explicit mappings from
> character numbers (or names) to glyphs, and PDF documents normally have
> a mapping from glyphs back to Unicode code points to support searching
> and copying text.

OK, I guess you've talked me into it.  Can I ask you for one last favor,
though: please resubmit this patch with a couple of tweaks:

 - Based off current mainline, please (or docs-next, but that shouldn't
   be necessary).  The patch as sent doesn't apply.

 - Could you add a comment to the check-lc_ctype proglet so that somebody
   stumbling across it in the scripts directory knows why it's there?

Thanks,

jon