Re: [tlug] Japanese input on Debian Testing

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

Mattia Dongili writes:

 > > I *cannot* believe that they haven't fixed this yet!  The POSIX locale
 > > should be a *hint* (and a very valuable one, because 99% of users are
 > > either monolingual or their other language is English == spellable
 > > with ASCII, but nevertheless *just* a hint).  This has been known to
 > > be broken for multilingual users since the early 1990s. :-(
 > 
 > my experience is that sun's (oracle's?) java has the problem,
 > open{jdk,jre} icedtea doesn't.

All software which uses the locale and/or other environment variables
to set the input method suffers from this.  It's a P aimed directly at
your A, even if you haven't felt it yet.  The problem is the design of
POSIX locales, which is tuned to convenience for monolingual users.
That's fine, most users *are* monolingual, but a system that sets
input methods according to the POSIX locale at startup *must* provide
a convenient escape for multilingual users -- and, except for
Emacsen[1], I don't know any runtime selection mechanism that's truly
convenient.  For example, the insane bullshit of having to register a
new input method with GTK, and restart applications, to use it.


Footnotes: 
[1]  And even there, Richard "POSIX_ME_HARDER" Stallman[2] screwed GNU
Emacs users by forcing them to use the horribly awkward XIM instead of
linking directly to libraries like Wnn and Canna.  I implemented a
proof-of-concept switching mechanism for XEmacs, but never put it in
the mainline because we do link directly to those libraries, so users
never complained.  GNU Emacs users eventually reimplemented the
network protocols for Wnn and Canna in Lisp, but I don't know what
they could do for Anthy etc that insist on linking .so's for security
reasons.
[2]  Richard normally rejects standards for the sake of standards,
arguing that the GNU System should be its own standard, and follow
public standards where it chooses.  Why he chose to be Dick in this
case is beyond me.