Re: Encoding non-alphanumeric characters in manpage filenames

[RVP <rvp%SDF.ORG@localhost>]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2021, Lassi Kortela wrote:

> In the present case, it's prudent to establish a clear rule by which the 
> filenames in man/cat directories can be taken apart to find the page, 
> section, and other suffixes. (This precludes using ".7z" compression for 
> manual pages, as Thierry pointed out, or else all tools which interpret 
> manpage filenames will have to account for ".7z" as a special case.) If this 
> rule is similar or identical to other such rules (e.g. standard filename 
> extensions, URL encoding), so much the better.

Well, man(1) needs to keep a mapping of .ext -> decompressor in
any case since the user could (potentially) have applied any
compressor to their man-pages. So I don't think .7z is a special
case.

You might also get away w/o using any extensions at all if you
introduced man(1) to libmagic(3). Then, you could just do: man
./x/y/z/blah

Right now you have a whole slew of _build & _crunch directives in
/etc/man.conf to deal just with this. But, I'm probably taking this
discussion too far afield from encoding-conventions...

-RVP