6.47. Man-DB-2.5.2

sed -i -e '\%\t/usr/man%d' -e '\%\t/usr/local/man%d' src/man_db.conf.in

./configure --prefix=/usr --libexecdir=/usr/lib \
    --sysconfdir=/etc --disable-setuid \
    --enable-mb-groff --with-browser=/usr/bin/lynx \
    --with-col=/usr/bin/col --with-vgrind=/usr/bin/vgrind \
    --with-grap=/usr/bin/grap

make

make install

6.47.2. Non-English Manual Pages in LFS

Some packages provide non-English manual pages. They are displayed correctly only if their location and encoding matches the expectation of the "man" program. However, different Linux distributions have different policies (expressed in the choice of the man program, its configuration and patches applied to it) concerning the character encoding in which manual pages are stored in the filesystem.

E.g., Debian previously required Russian manual pages to be encoded in KOI8-R and to be placed in /usr/share/man/ru. Now, in addition, their man program (Man-DB) searches for UTF-8 encoded Russian manual pages in /usr/share/man/ru.UTF-8. On the other hand, Fedora uses UTF-8 encoded manual pages exclusively. Russian manual pages are found in /usr/share/man/ru and their man program doesn't acknowledge /usr/share/man/ru.UTF-8. Many other distributions ignore the on disk encodings completely, leaving the end user with a mix of improperly encoded manual pages for their configuration. When man processes the requtested page, it will display the contents as configured, resulting in completely unreadable text if the on disk encoding is not what is expected for that configuration.

Disagreement about the expected encoding of manual pages amongst distribution vendors, has led to confusion for upstream package maintainers. One package may contain UTF-8 manual pages, while another ships with manual pages in legacy encodings. man searches for manual pages based on the user's locale settings. Man-DB uses a built-in table (see below) to determine the on disk encoding of manual pages found for a user's locale, only if the directories found do not have an extension that describes the encoding. E.g., because of ".UTF-8" in the directory name, Man-DB knows that all manual pages residing in /usr/share/man/fr.UTF-8 are UTF-8 encoded and, according to the built-in table, expects all manual pages residing in /usr/share/man/ru to be encoded using KOI8-R.

Packages may install manual pages into an improperly named directory, depending on which distributions the author develops the package for. To assist in the conversion of the manual pages to the proper encoding for the directory in which they are installed, the convert-mans script was written. It will convert manual pages to another encoding before (or after) installation. Install the convert-mans script with the following instructions:

cat >> convert-mans << "EOF"
#!/bin/sh -e
FROM="$1"
TO="$2"
shift ; shift
while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
        FILE="$1"
        shift
        iconv -f "$FROM" -t "$TO" "$FILE" >.tmp.iconv
        mv .tmp.iconv "$FILE"
done
EOF
install -m755 convert-mans  /usr/bin

If upstream distributes the manual pages in a legacy encoding, the manual pages can simply be copied to /usr/share/man/<language code>. For example, German manual pages can be installed with the following commands:

mkdir -p /usr/share/man/de
cp -rv man? /usr/share/man/de

If upstream distributes manual pages in UTF-8 (i.e., “for RedHat”) instead of the encoding listed in the table above, they can either be converted from UTF-8 to the encoding listed in the table above, or they can be installed directly into /usr/share/man/<language code>.UTF-8.

For example, to install French manual pages in the legacy encoding, use the following commands:

convert-mans UTF-8 ISO-8859-1 man?/*.?
mkdir -p /usr/share/man/fr
cp -rv man? /usr/share/man/fr

Finally, as an example installation of UTF-8 manual pages, again, the French manual pages could be installed with the following commands:

mkdir -p /usr/share/man/fr.UTF-8
cp -rv man? /usr/share/man/fr.UTF-8