bug#29872: 26.0.90; `man' output encoding, hyphen chars

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2017 16:35:50 -0800 (PST)
> From: Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>
> Cc: 29872@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> > Then I think you will have to set up process-coding-system-alist such
> > that it reads output from 'man' with utf-8 decoding.  I don't know
> > what changed since Emacs 25, but if 'man' produces UTF-8 encoded
> > hyphens by default, Emacs needs to be told about that.
> 
> I have no idea in what way to change
> `process-coding-system-alist'.  The doc string and
> (elisp) `Default Coding System' give me no hint that
> I can recognize.

You said you had this stuff set up for Bash:

  (setq process-coding-system-alist
        (cons '("bash" . (raw-text-dos . raw-text-unix))
               process-coding-system-alist))

so I assumed you knew how to do that for another program.

> I don't even know whether it is the VAL (which is
> `(raw-text-dos . raw-text-unix)') that is incorrect
> or it is the PATTERN (which is "bash") that is
> incorrect, or both.

If you don't have problems with Bash, then its existing association in
the alist, as set by those cygwin-* libraries, is fine for you.  (The
latest Cygwin uses UTF-8 by default, so if your Bash is fairly recent,
I'd suggest to change the above as well, to use utf-8 instead of
raw-text.  If your Bash is old, then you probably don't need to
bother.)

For 'man', try this:

  (setq process-coding-system-alist
        (cons '("man" . (utf-8-dos . utf-8-unix))
               process-coding-system-alist))

> And it is not even a user option.

I'm surprised you find this customization so impenetrable.  It's an
alist which is IMO clearly documented, and you already have an example
for Bash.  So what exactly is the difficulty to customize it for a
given program, given the existing documentation?