Re: mutt and Japanese

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

Neil Booth <neil@example.com> writes:

> Joss Winn wrote:-
> 
> > I think I now have good Japanese support in a SUSE 7.1PPC default Mutt.
> > 
> > I went to download the sources via kondara.org/~g/mutt-e.html
> > 
> > Just before I was about to build and patch, I read mutt-1.3.17i-ja0/mutt-ja.rc
> > and found some settings in there.  I applied them to my .muttrc and
> > after commenting out the lines that produced errors, I now have a
> > working Mutt with Japanese support.  Well, at least my tests seem
> > OK.  I can send and receive in Japanese.  Subject headings are in
> > Japanese in the Mutt index and sending to Netscape Messenger seems
> > to work OK, too.  I use a kterm, cannaserver, kinput2 and run Mutt with
> > the LANG=ja_JP command in an English environment.
> > 
> > I'd like to test it one last time. Can you read this?
> > 
> > 読めますか
> > 
> > I am using the default SUSE 7.1 PPC with the default Mutt 1.3.12i-0.
> > I have no idea whether Japanse support was built into this
> > specifically.  

No, it's a regular Mutt.

> That's curious.  So what's going on?  If you can use the default Mutt with
> some changes to your .muttrc file (sounds cool, I'm about to try it), why
> are there patches to 1.3.17i going around?  What do they add?

I didn't yet have time to investigate the added value by Japanese Mutt
patches either.

I am not an experienced Mutt user (Usually I use XEmacs and Gnus for
email), so I might have missed something, but I did a few tests with
the regular Mutt and it seemed to work OK for Japanese.

We try to use Japanese patches only if we are sure that they don't
break anything for other languages, use Japanese patches causing
problems for other languages only when absolutely necessary for
Japanese, and then make the patched package optional.

So in case of Mutt I decided to leave without Japanese patches for the
moment as it seemed to be OK for Japanese already.

> Why aren't the Japanese developers getting their stuff put in the
> main distribution?

Some patches seem to be difficult to integrate in the main distributions.

For example for groff I the Japanese patches seem to be still
necessary. The regular groff can display Japanese man pages with some
minor tweaks, but the formatting is terrible, mainly because Japanese
doesn't use spaces between the words. So a patched "jgroff" is still
necessary to display Japanese man pages with nice formatting.

Integrating the Japanese patches to groff into the main groff source
seems to be not easy. There was a longer discussion on the groff
mailing list about that recently.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。