tlug: Canna with Emacs 20.2 on RH 5.0?

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

>>>>> "Irene" == Irene Langner <irene.langner@example.com> writes:

    Irene> I am running Emacs 20.2 on RH 5.0 and don't like quail very
    Irene> much so far.

Welcome to the club.

    Irene> I would like to stick to (FSF) Emacs 20 and keep my canna
    Irene> user dictionary, if possible, but so far I haven't heard of
    Irene> an Emacs 20 distribution with canna or wnn built in.

You won't.  It's a religious thing, as far as I can tell.  (Partly
related to the usual "Japanese patch-writers don't see the point of
complying with Stallman's nit-picky standards," but I think Stallman
thinks the low-level code is itself evil.  This is really hearsay
though.  However, Handa himself has said on the Mule list that native
Canna/Wnn support isn't going to happen.)

    Irene> Can I get canna or wnn to work with Emacs 20 easily?

AFAIK TL, Debian-JP, and possibly RedHat provide patched versions of
Emacs 20.

If you don't want to reinstall, you can use XIM.

As root (eg, in init, probably already set up): cannaserver
As your user: kinput2 -canna & # get the RPM if you don't have it already.
In emacs: Shift-SPACE gets you into kinput2 mode and out.

This according to Handa on the mule list.

I haven't customized this UI so I don't know how to make it pretty.
(I basically disabled it under XEmacs because it got in the way of
LEIM development; native Canna/Wnn works with LEIM.  Making XIM
LEIM-compliant is on the to-do list for XEmacs.)  I have no idea what
the quality of the lowlevel code is (it sucked as of 19.34, basically
just plain didn't work); I'm familiar with the XEmacs implementation
of XIM but I believe that was written from scratch by Martin Buchholz.

    Irene> I remember Craig talking about a patch to Emacs 20.2 on
    Irene> Debian for enabling canna. Would this (still) be the same
    Irene> procedure for RH?

Don't.  You'll have to do it every time you upgrade Emacs, and wait
for the patches.  The patches will not necessarily be against the
release version of Emacs.  Etc, etc.  Use a distributed version from
one of the *-JP archives (Debian-JP, JRPM, or PJE).  I don't know much 
about them except that they exist though.

    Irene> Also I have heard mixed recommendations about upgrading to
    Irene> 20.3 or waiting for 20.4. (one warning concerned MIME
    Irene> support, which is still on my todo list, too. I'm not sure
    Irene> about Unicode either.).

XEmacs 21.0 will be out soon^H^H^H^HRSN (I cannot tell a lie; things
have been delayed :-(, mostly due to the Windows port I think).  :-)

Seriously, what do you need the upgrade for?  There are still people
around happily using Emacs 18.59 + NEmacs.  I wasn't very impressed
with the NEWS for Emacs 20.2.  If you can't come up with a good reason 
to switch, stay with what works.

The Unicode support that was ported from Emacs to XEmacs a few months
ago is a hack.  Ugly.  Not ready for prime time.

    Irene> As for canna, some time ago Steve recommended to use a
    Irene> TL-distribution, because it's linked against glibc.  I got
    Irene> Canna-3.5b2-10TL.i386.rpm and
    Irene> Canna-shlib-3.5b2-10TL.i386.rpm, but no canna.el or
    Irene> something comes with it.

Right, .els are part of Emacs.

    Irene> So I am not sure how to proceed from there. Can I use an
    Irene> old canna.el with it?

No.  You need the C-level patches.  Don't even think of trying to
borrow an old .el; the interface to Mule for Emacs 20 is very
different, and you probably need several other files.  This is only
documented in the source (and I don't mean explanatory comments,
either).

XEmacs works with Canna and Wnn out of the box, and they are
supported, as is XIM.  Emacs 20 provides XIM, so you can use Canna and
Wnn via kinput2.  XIM is undocumented and a fortiori unsupported with
Emacs 20.

-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
What are those two straight lines for?  "Free software rules."
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Technical Meeting: February 13 (Sat), 12:30 place: Temple Univ.
** presentation: XEmacs, by Steven Baur and Martin Buchholz
Next Nomikai: March 19 (Fri), 19:30   Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
-------------------------------------------------------------------
more info: http://tlug.linux.or.jp                     Sponsor: PHT