Re: [tlug] debian japanese

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 03:09:21AM -0800, Michael Moyle wrote:

> Getting mutt to work was particularly aggravating. In the end it was
> simple, and I am thankful for Frank Bennent's earlier posts. 

What version of mutt are you using? As I noted in a post to this list
a couple of months ago, mutt 1.3.27 handles Japanese just fine -- the
only catch is, you have to compile it from source, with a couple of
non-standard configuration options. For me it was just:

    ./configure --enable-locales-fix --without-wc-funcs
    make
    make install

And I was all set.

> I am thinking of putting up a web site describing what I did. Does this
> exist somewhere or will this be something new? Maybe I missed a relevant
> site. What I would like to do is post clearly defined, step by step things
> to do to get Japanese working with mutt, emacs, and debian. Since I
> could not find this information, I have been forced to spend a few hours
> learning about these subsytems. Sadly this is becoming a complaint about

If you only spent a few hours on it, count yourself fortunate! When I started
using Japanese on Linux back in '96 and '97, I spent many, many, many hours
trying to get everything to work -- and some of the TLUG oldtimers, I'm sure,
spent more hours than I. Believe it or not, i18n and Japanese support on
Linux have come a long way since then. 

Not that I would discourage you from putting up that web site. Documentation
on this topic (at least in English) is still inadequate by any standard.

> Do any of these problems exist with debian-jp? Maybe the thing to do
> (next time) is to start with debian-jp and hope everything
> works. Compounding things could be the fact that I am running debian

The debian-jp distribution is going away soon, if it hasn't already. This
is explained on the debian-jp website, though it could be explained more
obviously. The development group feels that Debian's i18n support has
progressed to the point where a separate Japanese distribution is no
longer necessary, so the project has changed its focus to providing 
Japanese support for the main distribution. 

> woody, which is not release, and could have some bugs, like in the
> language-env package. 

Well, any Linux distribution could have some bugs. I'm not sure 'is not
release' is really a meaningful statement: although woody is called 'testing',
the Debian group is very conservative in labeling things production-quality,
as opposed to, say, RedHat, which has become notorious for horrendously
buggy x.0 releases. I know a number of people who use woody and say it's
generally very solid -- though I'm still on potato myself (just haven't
gotten around to upgrading yet).

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee@example.com
http://www.havenrock.com/