Re: jlug mailing list???

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Dennis" == Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com> writes:

[in re: JLUG]
    Dennis> 1. Apparently the membership procedures which I had
    Dennis> criticized as ridiculously complex are necessary in order
    Dennis> to establish their 'actuality' as a non-profit
    Dennis> corporation, which in turn was necessary in order to get
    Dennis> the domain name 'linux.or.jp'.

This is going to cost Japan dearly in the near future, as companies
like twics.COM and gol.COM mop up the market, going through foreign
providers, and user groups like TLUG do the same in the public domain.
In the medium term, who knows.  The bureaucrats have proved themselves
damn good at rooting out small corners of resistance....  Whether this 
will have an impact on medium-to-long-term growth of the Japanese
Internet and economy, I'm looking forward to seeing.

    Dennis>   Once a 'kanrishakai' always a 'kanrishakai', I guess.

Um, have you asked "x.org" what it took them to become a non-profit
organization?  Be fair....

    Dennis>   Newbie users are clamoring for kernel source diffs?
    Dennis> Huh?

Didn't you notice that linux.or.jp is actually a subdivision of
Yuseisho?  (joke, joke, I haven't looked) But don't you recognize that
bureaucratic "they'll want what we want to give them or else"
mentality?  :-(

    Dennis>   Speaking of which, anyone know what the traffic is like
    Dennis> (and the subscription address) for the above-mentioned

>From the JE FAQ (which I found through the good offices of Yahoo!
Japan---Stanford Gakubatsu strikes again)

        # Mail request-linux@example.com
        X-Mn-Cmd: join

This don't look like a Majordomo list to me....

I've never found Japanese lists very useful.  Mostly due to my poor
Japanese, but: I lurked on Canna's list for a while, and used to read
some of the fj.os.dos.<extender> lists.  The problem is that outside
of a couple of *really excellent* projects (mule is the outstanding
example) most Japanese software ends up as a bag on a kludge on the
side of a patch.  Eg, NTT-JLaTeX2e.  You can't properly install new
fonts without rebuilding TeX.  ASCII-JLaTeX2e may be better with
fonts, but requires a patched dvips.  Lose-lose.  (I have yet to run
into such problems with Mule, except that the Mule developers and I
have differing opinions as to the character class of `\'', `\"', and
`-', resulting in bizarre behavior in auto-fill mode, but those
problems *can be fixed in .emacs* without rebuilding Mule.)

You end up having to follow the list very very carefully, because it's
rare that a Japanese patch set works from one release of the base
software to the next.  This is why it's so rare to see Japanese
patches fully integrated with the base package.  Eg, when Emacs goes
from 19.28 to 19.33, you can usually just rebuild the new emacs with
the mule (not entirely, "some user assembly *is* required" :-).  But
there ain't no ongoing Japanese Mosaic project AFAIK.  (This is not a
problem with Japanese programmers, AFAIK, it's a problem with all
programmers.  It's just worse because any text-processing program
dealing with Japanese requires such patches.)  Nor is there a widely
available efficient way to use Ghostscript with Japanese yet, although
there may be soon.  It's certainly in principle possible to do it
without patching Ghostscript now, but that's due to the good offices
of Peter Deutsch (the Ghost in Ghostscript), not of the Japanese
software community (well, the original patches to GS 2.4 and 2.6 were
contributed by Japanese, but Peter integrated them into GS 3.x and
up).  (Japanese programmers mostly have kanji Postcript printers or
Windoze TrueType fonts, so who needs it? :-( )

    Dennis> mailing list?  Any good alternatives to Mule for reliable
    Dennis> J-email-handling.

If you ever do Chinese (you're the guy who was ecstatic over the fixed
cWnn, as I recall), no.  You'll need a separate Chinese program.  Mule
does both.  As far as I know (which ain't all that far, but I do look
around every once in a while), mule is still the only true
multi-lingual software environment around.

The other advantage to mule is that most of the environments and
add-ons you might want to use have emacs emulators (mh) or interfaces
(metamail) or aren't available outside of emacs (supercite).

For the truly multilingual (all languages that can be written with
ISO-8859-X are the same :-), Mule is the only game in town.

Steve

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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