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

[Jean-Michel Vourgère]

Package: perl
Version: 5.28.1-6
Severity: normal
File: /usr/bin/pod2man

Dear Maintainer,

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.

Right now, as a work around, I'm using in my make file:
pod2man ... --utf8 $< | sed -e $$'s|\u200B|\\\\:|g' > $@

This is working great.

However, it would be nice if pod2man would generate automatically the \:
escape sequences, so that I don't have to sed the output!

One could argue that man should handle the "\u200B" character correctly,
but it seems logical to have pod2man do the escape as it would works both
with and without utf-8 encoding.

Thank you!

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.1
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages perl depends on:
ii  dpkg               1.19.7
ii  libperl5.28        5.28.1-6
ii  perl-base          5.28.1-6
ii  perl-modules-5.28  5.28.1-6

Versions of packages perl recommends:
ii  netbase  5.6

Versions of packages perl suggests:
pn  libb-debug-perl                                         <none>
pn  liblocale-codes-perl                                    <none>
pn  libterm-readline-gnu-perl | libterm-readline-perl-perl  <none>
ii  make                                                    4.2.1-1.2
ii  perl-doc                                                5.28.1-6

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