Hi,

I'm writing this email to the Fedora community to give you a heads-up about what we are going to do with the new change introduced to the groff 1.23.0 version [1].
Upstream of groff stopped mapping the special characters (like hyphens, tilde, ...) to the Basic Latin codes like it previously did.

This change was quite controversial in the Debian community as the upstreams/maintainers of the man-pages that use these characters in a "not correct way" wanted this mapping back in the system. It leads to a 1+ hour read-long email thread [2] with discussions in other threads as well.

The final conclusion in Debian was to revert this change and leave the old mapping in place as the maintainer of groff received a ton of emails [3] and didn't want to spend all of his capacity on this issue.

After reading through all of the emails, we've decided to align with the Debian decision and revert this change, thereby retaining the current mapping. The main reason for this was to eliminate a bunch of bugs reported to the groff/man-pages packages about broken manual pages. Our capacity also has its limits, and we need to spend our resources wisely, and this decision was based on that. The reproducer and the issue description were reported in Bugzilla [4], so please read through it, if you are interested.

 
[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2023-07/msg00001.html
[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/
[3] https://lwn.net/ml/debian-devel/ZS0aV4XyJH+O1o%2Fc@riva.ucam.org/
[4] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2224123

--
S pozdravom/ Best regards

Lukáš Javorský

Software Engineer, Core service - Databases

Red Hat

Purkyňova 115 (TPB-C)

612 00 Brno - Královo Pole

ljavorsk@redhat.com