[MPlayer-translations] r28597 - trunk/DOCS/man/ru/mplayer.1

[Diego Biurrun]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 04:50:57AM +0300, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday 18 February 2009 00:27, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 04:42:58PM +0100, bircoph wrote:
> > > Log:
> > > Change man page encoding from KOI8-R to UTF-8.
> >
> > Wait a moment, does this work?  Last I checked, groff did not
> > support UTF-8 input...
> 
> I tested before commiting this change ;-). It works OK on both 
> Fedora and Gentoo. Most modern distros now support UTF-8 for man 
> pages, though through a different ways: afaik Fedora and Debian 
> use patched groff, Gentoo utilizes -D option in modern groff (this 
> invokes preconv shipped with groff, at least as of groff-1.20.1).

I know that Debian still uses a patched groff 1.18.1 that has trouble
with UTF-8 input.  The same applies to Ubuntu.  So this change likely
breaks the man page for the majority or a large part of our users.

> Moreover even rather old Fedora (groff-1.18.1.1, 17th Jan 2006) 
> complains about koi8-r in man pages: "WARNING: old character 
> encoding and/or character set" whilst it is OK with unicode.

Apparently they use a patched groff, which is great for them, but not
a solution for everybody.

> And the last but not the least. Before making any changes I asked 
> Vladimir (he is maintainer or Russian docs) whether this ok or not 
> (via a private mail), he approved this idea.

These things should not be decided via private email but rather discussed
on this mailing list.

In any case, this is not something that should be done shortly before a
release, please revert it.

After the release I think we need to evaluate the situation again and most
probably convert all man pages to UTF-8, no matter if Debian can handle
it or not.  I think the situation is starting to become untenable, we
need to get out of the 1990s.

Diego