Bug 133521

Summary:	Is recommendation of "LESSCHARSET=latin1" a good idea these days?
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Telsa Gwynne <hobbit>
Component:	man	Assignee:	Eido Inoue <havill>
Status:	CLOSED RAWHIDE	QA Contact:	Ben Levenson <benl>
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	2
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:	1.5o1-1	Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2004-11-10 01:27:25 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Telsa Gwynne 2004-09-24 16:47:19 UTC

Description of problem:

I've been plagued by weird characters when reading man pages
for some time. I knew that some weirdnesses were to be 
expected due to (I think) the move to UTF-8 some releases
ago. But I was still seeing more than most people.

Eventually realised that I had this in ~/.bash_profile:
  LESSCHARSET=latin1
..because this was a workaround recommended in the
BUGS section of "man man". (I had been having the problem
described at the time, and that had fixed it, and then I had
kept the line in my dotfiles. Since about RH 8. Oops.)

For people using UTF-8-happy locales, is this actually a
good recommendation these days? Or should it be amended?
If so, to what? (I have no clue myself.)

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

man-1.5m2-6
less-382-3

How reproducible: every time

Steps to Reproduce:
1. man ping
2. LESSCHARSET="latin1" man ping

Comment 1 Eido Inoue 2004-10-21 20:56:53 UTC

there are some people that still try to run their systems in the "old"
mode. the man page says to only put the LESSCHARSET in if you see
"blinking \255 or <AD>"... so it can probably stay in there, as you
won't see these on a properly configured system, thus you wouldn't put
LESSCHARSET in.