[Libguestfs] Preliminary release notes for libguestfs 1.50, guestfs-tools 1.50

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 01:03:46PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 06:36:04PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > 
> > $SUBJECT here ...
> > 
> >   https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/docs/guestfs-release-notes-1.50.pod
> 
> Currently contains a pod error:
>  https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/docs/guestfs-release-notes-1.50.pod#pod-errors
> 
> I presume there's a way to mark the .pod file, or at least tweak the
> Makefile that renders the page from .pod, to state that the input is
> intentionally UTF-8, in order to clear out that error.

So the reason for this is because what we write isn't strictly a POD
file.  Instead, podwrapper[1] adds extra stuff at the top and bottom
of the file before parsing it.  One of the things it adds is the
correct "=encoding utf8" directive, which is necessary because POD
otherwise assumes the input is 7 bit ASCII.

The reason that we don't just write POD directly is because:

 - We want to add standard sections at the end.

 - To avoid a complicated problem in translated files generated by
   po4a where it would generate bad =encoding lines[2]

Of course github's renderer knows nothing about this and assumes the
source must be ASCII [by the looks of it, it's running pod2html on the
file].

We might see if the po4a problem is fixed now (or if we can fix it),
and then we could add =encoding lines back into the files, but TBH
it's not high on my list.

Rich.

[1] https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/podwrapper.pl.in

[2] https://listman.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2014-March/thread.html#8326


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