Hello all, At https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60807 is a proposal to convert the pages of the the "man-pages" project to UTF 8. I thought it worthwhile bringing that topic to the list, and CCing a few people who may have some ideas about this step, since I'm not too sure of the implications. Peter Schiffer has kindly written some some scripts to do the conversion, which would touch about 40 files. However, as far I can tell, many of the pages that have non-ASCII characters have inside groff comments (author's names, etc.). The only pages that have non-ASCII characters in the rendered source are various man7 pages on character sets. These were the pages to which I added a groff encoding marker in response to Colin Watson's input on this Debian bug: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=519209 Moving to UTF-8 for the pages seems like a good idea, at least at some point. However, I'm wondering whether there are any backward compatibility issues that I should need to worry about. As far as I know, groff added UTF-8 support back in Jan 2009, so, just over 5 years ago. Perhaps that's long enough ago now, that any backward compatibility issues with old versions of groff would be minimal. (I.e., the number of people installing new man-pages on systems with old groff is likely to be very small, and anyway, only a dozen or so pages in Section 7 are affected. Furthermore, I'm assuming that Linux distros have been shipping groff v1.20+ for quite a long time now.) Bottom line question: anyone see a reason not to do this conversion now? Thanks, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
