podlators 2.1.0

Switching to Perl 5.10 for Debian unstable uncovered a bunch of little problems with the Pod::Man based on Pod::Simple that's included with it. I've unfortunately been slow to fix those problems due to being buried in other work, but this release finally cleans up the ones that have been reported, namely:

• Font problems with two or more C<> blocks in a =head
• Fix subheadings with leading *roff metacharacters
• Fix hyphen escaping to not corrupt eth characters

However, the big change is that pod2man now supports a -u (--utf8) option saying to not munge input characters into ASCII and *roff escapes that only work with troff and instead output literal UTF-8 characters and assume one's man program can cope. This will now be true of Debian as of lenny.

I have no good ideas for how to do the transition, since the resulting *roff is not portable and, if copied to another system, can even cause deficient nroff programs to segfault. One of the goals of Pod::Man was always to produce portable *roff output, so this option is not the default. However, it is clearly the Right Thing To Do for systems whose man and/or nroff are sufficiently intelligent; any other option either requires embedding groff-specific character escapes (same portability problem) or corrupting non-ASCII characters badly (the previous approach).

Any bright ideas welcome. In the meantime, people who know they're working on systems with modern nroff and man can at least get correct output now.

Hopefully podlators 2.1.0 will make it into lenny (as part of the Perl package, since it's a Perl core module), either as 5.10.1 if upstream is fast enough or as a Debian-local modification. (We definitely need a new Perl release before lenny; #480428 would be embarassing and is already driving me nuts by producing spurious output from lots of cron jobs. I'm thinking about asking for an upgrade of the priority.)