Bug#492037: Bug#500210: perldoc perlrun spits out junk in synopsis

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Thu, Jun 06, 2013 at 11:29:42AM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> Tags: -1 - patch
> 
> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 04:05:11PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> writes:
> > 
> > > It's clearly still true, and I can't see any fix for it other than
> > > adding =encoding utf8 lines in the POD files where necessary.
> > 
> > > However, I think all the documents that are rendered incorrectly with
> > > --utf8 are already rendered incorrectly now, albeit in a different
> > > way. See below.
> > 
> > Yes, without the --utf8 option, pod2man assumes that it can only use 7-bit
> > ASCII, and hence mangles non-ASCII characters pretty badly.  This is
> > required for completely portable *roff output, since high-bit characters
> > can even cause segfaults on some really old, broken *roff implementations.
> > But this is probably now too conservative.
> > 
> > I think the default, if --utf8 is not given, should probably be to just
> > encode output in whatever the default local locale is and assume that
> > people will do something else if they have to generate *roff that works on
> > old, broken systems.  I'm not sure what to do if that locale is C, though.
> 
> Niko's patch to use pod2man --utf8 was applied (and then the code was
> rewritten...). As we have seen during the perl 5.18 rebuild testing,
> missing =encoding is now a fatal error.
> 
> I think these points mean that this bug is essentially fixed with Debian
> (experimental) and should be closed. I will aim to verify this using the
> test case provided by the original submitter before closing this bug
> (I don't have access to a suitable test system at the moment, but I
> wanted to record this on the bug report whilst at least some of the
> details were in my head).

I've just tested and the original example_russian.pod now renders okay
with =encoding UTF8 and pod2man --utf8. So I think this particular 
bug report can be resolved, finally.

Cheers,
Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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