Re: [groff] [patch] modernize -T ascii rendering of opening single quote

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Feb 02, 2019 at 05:57:31PM +0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Ralph Corderoy wrote on Sat, Feb 02, 2019 at 02:59:21PM +0000:
> > Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> >> It doubt that the benefit of avoiding the ugly ` ' in ASCII output is
> >> worth these (at least) three downsides.
> 
> > Whom is this change is meant to benefit?  I've lost track.
> 
> People reading roff(7) documents with nroff(1) or man(1) in a terminal
> window while they have LC_CTYPE=C set and while they are using a modern
> font.

One common real-world example I'd offer would be anyone who has a modern
terminal/font/etc. setup locally but who is reading a man page while
SSHed into a server that doesn't have a matching locale (it's not at all
unusual for me to find that en_GB.UTF-8 hasn't been generated on some
server or other).  Unfortunately we don't have a robust mechanism for
sshd to pick some other suitable locale that at least has a matching
encoding, and the details of this would no doubt be difficult to define
anyway; so the upshot is that somebody in this situation ends up with
the equivalent of LC_ALL=C on the remote system even though they
normally prefer UTF-8 locally.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden