Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 143470
About a warning message that nroff(1) outputs
Last modified: 2013-07-02 19:04:38 EDT
Description of problem: If man(1) displays a manual file encoded with legacy encodings (such as EUC-JP), nroff(1) outputs the following warning message. -------- XXX XXX WARNING: old character encoding and/or character set XXX -------- This message is at risk of causing end users an unexpected misunderstanding. So could you prevent nroff(1) from outputting the warning message? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): groff-1.18.1.1-3 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: Assume that the current locale ja_JP.UTF-8 1. back up an original manual file # cd /usr/share/man/ja/man1 # cp -p mv.1.gz mv.1.gz.utf8 2. convert UTF-8 to EUC-JP # gunzip mv.1.gz # iconv -f utf8 -t eucjp mv.1 > mv.1.eucjp # gzip -c mv.1.eucjp > mv.1.gz 3. display the manual file # man mv Actual results: # man mv XXX XXX WARNING: old character encoding and/or character set XXX MV(1) : : Expected results: # man mv MV(1) : : Additional info:
Add RHEL4-L3support team in Japan
Fujitsu, I'm not sure that I follow what you're asking for here. Removing the warning message isn't really a good idea, as then there's no indication that character display problems might be rooted in the fact that the encoding/character set is old. What other solutions would Fujitsu like to see?
This is really a feature request rather than a bug. While it may be desirable for nroff to only report the error if it's asked for, (such as with a verbose or other similar type of option), this is not actually broken. These encoding warnings have also been the same for the last several releases. Displaying these messages does not cause any harm as all the message is saying is that the encoding is old and therefore display problems could result. Also, the encodings on a man page had to be converted in order to trigger this, so it is not something that users will see in normal day-to-day activity. The encodings in the latest release should be cleaned up. If there is something that is not, the bugs should be opened specifically against the packages in question rather than the package that is merely merely reporting the old encodings. This bug report is being closed as 'not a bug'. If the requester needs the functionality changed, please open a new IT Feature Request using the template with the required information.