Bug 435085 - localation of man output forced to utf-8
Summary: localation of man output forced to utf-8
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
Classification: Red Hat
Component: man
Version: 5.1
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
low
low
Target Milestone: rc
: ---
Assignee: Peter Schiffer
QA Contact: qe-baseos-daemons
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2008-02-27 10:21 UTC by Klaus Ethgen
Modified: 2013-01-10 17:24 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2013-01-10 17:24:56 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Klaus Ethgen 2008-02-27 10:21:27 UTC
Description of problem:
The output of man (the command itself) is always UTF-8. This is horrible with
language settings to other encodings.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
1.6d-1.1

How reproducible:
export LANG=de_DE
export LC_MESSAGES=de_DE
man bla

Actual results:
Keine Handbuchseite für bla

Expected results:
Keine Handbuchseite für bla

Additional info:
There is no UTF-8 cable environment in use! The terminal is xterm with no "-u8"
command line option and all language settings are the normal de_DE settings.
Also setting of explicit ".ISO-8859-1" does not work.

Comment 1 Ivana Varekova 2010-04-14 10:41:22 UTC
Hello, this seems to be xterm problem.

Comment 2 Miroslav Lichvar 2010-04-14 10:45:04 UTC
Actually, that would be a problem with nroff if it produces utf8 output in non-utf8 locale.

Comment 3 Ivana Varekova 2010-05-18 12:06:51 UTC
Hello,
I try to reproduce the problem but I was unsuccesfull, is there any other settings you use?

Comment 4 Petr Pisar 2010-06-06 23:17:45 UTC
This is not about nroff output. It's about `man' utility itself.

The utility is not locale charset aware. The reason is man uses POSIX message catalogues instead of GNU gettext. POSIX catalogues do not save charset of catalogue at compile time and thus do not provide run-time recoding to current locale charset.

Comment 5 RHEL Program Management 2011-09-23 00:08:59 UTC
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for
inclusion in the current release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Because the affected component is not scheduled to be updated in the
current release, Red Hat is unfortunately unable to address this
request at this time. Red Hat invites you to ask your support
representative to propose this request, if appropriate and relevant,
in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Comment 6 Peter Schiffer 2013-01-10 17:24:56 UTC
I am closing this bug. As Petr explained in comment 4, the fix is not trivial and it's too late for extensive patches in RHEL-5. Also, this problem doesn't occur in RHEL-6.

peter


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