Re: [groff] 02/02: nroff.1.man: Make editorial fixes.

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Branden,

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 01:03:04AM +1000:
> At 2019-07-01T16:42:10+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:

>> I know this is a really minor point - but i don't understand this change:
>> 
>>    $ LC=C printf "a\nA\n" | sort
>>   A
>>   a
>>    $ LC=en_US.UTF-8 printf "a\nA\n" | sort
>>   A
>>   a

> Well, (1) LC is not a POSIX-standard locale-controlling variable,
> as far as I know.  Is it a BSDism?

Ooops, no, it was just a typo.
My test was indeed quite wrong in more than one respect.

> Try this:
> 
> $ printf 'A\na\nb\nB\n' | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 sort
> a
> A
> b
> B

Confirmed on Debian Linux and on Oracle Solaris.

> Then try it with LC_ALL=C.

A
B
a
b

on both systems.

(OpenBSD invariably gives the LC_ALL=C result, but that's no
surprise because LC_COLLATE intentionally does nothing on OpenBSD.)

This is funny (on Solaris 11):

   > printf 'A\na\nb\nB\n' | LC_ALL=zh_CN.UTF-8 sort
  a
  A
  b
  B
   > printf 'A\na\nb\nB\n' | LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8 sort
  A
  B
  a
  b

even though both are valid according to "locale -a".  So the concept
of "locale collation" doesn't appear to be all that well-defined -
but instead locale-dependent - even for base latin characters.

>> The only system i was able to find with "small before capital"
>> is Solaris/illumos.  Linux appears to have no clear convention:
>> most often, ordering is totally random in Linux manual pages.
>> 
>> So why did you change the order?

> To combat the chaos.

Oh well, so it appears there are three different conventions then:

 - the POSIX / traditional BSD / FreeBSD / AIX / ASCII  -ABCabc
 - the NetBSD / OpenBSD                                 -AaBbCc
 - the Solaris / illumos / en_US(?)                     -aAbBcC

I'm probably just too used to the first two such that i considered
them universial...

Given all those different conventions, it's probably fair enough
to leave the bike shed painted in the colour you chose.
Sorry for the noise, then.

Yours,
  Ingo