Re: [tlug] GNU EMacs & Japanese files

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "ijw" == ijw  <ijw@example.com> writes:

    >> XEmacs 21.4 on Windows can be built with Mule, but it's not
    >> supported and has lots of problems.  It's easy to build 21.5 in
    >> Cygwin, though.

    ijw> I think this is the answer I'm looking for - I didn't realise
    ijw> that support had improved that dramatically in .5 and .4 is
    ijw> the default for Cygwin.  I shall experiment...

For Unix platforms, the degree of improvement is so far questionable;
the external Unicode support has been reimplemented from scratch
internally.  This has its plusses (mostly for future development) and
a few minuses.

For Windows, however, Mule simply didn't work very well in 21.4
because of rather different models of internationalization between
Mule and Windows.  It was possible to deal with this to some extent,
but it required third-party patches that were not going to be in 21.5
and later, so few people bothered to work on them.  Not necessarily
broken, you understand, but we don't have enough confidence in them to
integrate them into 21.4 even today.

In 21.5, the entire internal support for I18N on Windows has been
reworked to use Win32 Unicode APIs, which is a huge win, as Microsoft
didn't bother to implement _everything_ that Unicode APIs can do as
legacy wrappers, and we need some of the stuff that wasn't
implemented.  It's now true that the Mule APIs for Unix and Windows
are equally capable, which isn't true in 21.4.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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