Re: I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
-On [20001022 10:55], [EMAIL PROTECTED] ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I seriously advice against directly importing the Citrus code. It is very good work and a lot will be borrowed, but on my latest investigations it also made a lot of unnecessary and gratuitous changes. which part looks gratuitous? could you be more specific? #ifdef's for FreeBSD. rune_t/_rune_t type recasting _COMPAT_RUNE #ifdef's. for example. But of course, these are _my_ investigations, I might have totally missed the point in what they were trying to do there. -- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven Network- and systemadministrator [EMAIL PROTECTED]VIA Net.Works The Netherlands BSD: Technical excellence at its best http://www.via-net-works.nl The administration of justice is the firmest pillar of government... To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
On Thu, Oct 19, 2000 at 08:38:47PM +0200, Johan Granlund scribbled: | On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Michael C . Wu wrote: | At the BSDCon I18N BOF, we discussed several things that could/should | happen with the future of I18N(internationalization) in FreeBSD. | We would like some inputs and comments regarding the following: | 2. Needing a graphics console to display various character sets. | There should be a kernel or loader option to start | a graphics console by default. | The magic word is option :) | We have to be careful to not loose the ability to boot a bare-bone system | if / when having problems. Right, it will/should be an option. | I _still_ like VAX/VMS ability to be "talked" up thru the boot process. Er, *meep* too young to know what you are talking about -- +--+ | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | http://peorth.iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +--+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
On Thu, Oct 19, 2000 at 01:16:12PM -0700, Jordan Hubbard scribbled: |The advantages are : | A. Easy bug reporting by users. (e.g. "I have error 2398423") | B. I18N error messages | | Let me just say, as someone who's done "escalation tech support" for | major ISVs (the people who get called whenever front-line tech support | is confronted with a "I have error 2398423" question), that this can | also be a tremendous pain in the butt when done wrong. The format I have in mind is more like: kern.pci.cardbus.insert.ed0 kern.net.tcpip.route.not-responding.gateway.123.233.233.100 kern.pci.pcm.yamaha.ptr.mem.0xfedf8000.irq9.device.9.on-pci0 | Done wrong, a message catalog-using program will emit cryptic numeric | errors whenever a message catalog file cannot be found or is | corrupted. Done right, the program is written in such a way as to | contain a default message which can also be overridden from the | message catalog file if some different text is found in the | appropriate language. I believe this is the way that catgets(3) | currently works, but you'd be amazed how many programmers just skip | providing a default message since the appropriate message catalog is | always found on *their* system. | | There's also nothing more unreadable than code which tests a failure | condition and then calls a message catalog routine with some numeric | constant, the actual text of the error message being an aid to the | programmer as well as the user when reading someone else's code and | trying to figure out what varioups parts of it are trying to do. So can we output the message catalogue name along with the plaintext message? -- +--+ | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | http://peorth.iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +--+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
At the BSDCon I18N BOF, we discussed several things that could/should happen with the future of I18N(internationalization) in FreeBSD. We would like some inputs and comments regarding the following: * Moving to message catalogue style error messages for the kernel and userland. (AIX style) Each time the system outputs an error either from the kernel or userland, the error message is a formatted alphanumerica string mapped to verbose error messages. The error messages can be mapped to various languages. The advantages are : A. Easy bug reporting by users. (e.g. "I have error 2398423") B. I18N error messages The main disadvantage is that it will be a long term work to maintain it and to keep error messages updated. 1. The future of sysinstall (or whatever should replace it) The future installer/management utility should be able to handle arbitrary character sets. In other words, it should be able to display Chinese/Japanese/etc. with user selection. To be discussed. 2. Needing a graphics console to display various character sets. There should be a kernel or loader option to start a graphics console by default. 3. Itojun mentioned that the CITRUS Japanese people will be able to import the wchar* and libxpg4 changes soon. 4. ports/language/auto-l10n Auto-localization port It will be like ports/x11/gnome and depend on all necessary ports. The user will be able to choose what kind of applications s/he requires, like the old Apache ports. 5. Produce /usr/share/skel/language that allow admin to specify the default language for the users login.conf bla bla bla 6. All language development groups should coordinate efforts in order to not reinvent wheels. Suggest using [EMAIL PROTECTED] 7. Documentation should have an automatic implementation of notifying various language documentation groups to update changes. This allows for quick changes to translated efforts. 8. waiting for ICONV from Konstantine I am willing to coordinate these things, but I would like some help. ;) Thanks, Michael -- +--+ | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | http://peorth.iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +--+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
On 10/19/00, Michael C . Wu wrote: 3. Itojun mentioned that the CITRUS Japanese people will be able to import the wchar* and libxpg4 changes soon. This is great! I believe many developers have spent too much unnecessary time dealing with wchar.h. Is there a timeline yet? BTW, are there any plans bringing language information into the system? ie. nl_langinfo.h nl_types.h, which are defined in the Single Unix Spec 2. From what I saw in the Citrus cvs, it seems that they have done the NetBSD part, but neither FreeBSD nor OpenBSD. 4. ports/language/auto-l10n Auto-localization port It will be like ports/x11/gnome and depend on all necessary ports. The user will be able to choose what kind of applications s/he requires, like the old Apache ports. This one gonna be controversial. :-) 8. waiting for ICONV from Konstantine Does this mean that there will be a consistent filesystem interface? -- Keep it simple and stupid. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
* Moving to message catalogue style error messages for the kernel and userland. (AIX style) Each time the system outputs an error either from the kernel or userland, the error message is a formatted alphanumerica string mapped to verbose error messages. The error messages can be mapped to various languages. The advantages are : A. Easy bug reporting by users. (e.g. "I have error 2398423") B. I18N error messages The main disadvantage is that it will be a long term work to maintain it and to keep error messages updated. I have a tool which uses a macro preprocessor and macros to do the majority of this work. It extracts messages from programs which have macro wrapped their I/O strings, and can automatically create XPG/4 message catalogs from them. I wrote this tool on my own time, but it has additions for supporting "ccat" (An InterJet specific non-XPG/4 locale data format). I could either rip these out, or leave them in, which might mean that I have to try to get Whistle's permission to release the code, if they consider the file format to be either proprietary or a trade secret. This is complicated by the fact that I haven't worked at Whistle/IBM for the last month. I can provide a version with the Whistle stuff ripped out in a week or so, if that's considered desirable, but would prefer to leave the code alone. Doing it this way will have a latency in however long it takes them to get back to me, though, so it might be better to burn the time to rip out the Whistle stuff. Right now, this preprocessor is only useful on code that has the ability to have functions or macros of the format "foo((...))", so it should work on C C+, Pascal, or Ada, but not much else. It doesn't recognize block "#idef OMIT" style omission, and it does not recognize C++ style comments, but I consider both of these to be features. Language support is easy to add, but requires that you have a simple language parser so that you can know the parse state when it sees a token that it likes (i.e. it nees to know what to ignore, and when). I applied this to Matt Dillon's public domain "BESTSERV" code in order to support Japanese, and it worked with no problems (but I had to add RFC2045 and RFC2047 to BESTSERV at the same time, so it's not too general an example of minimal changes). If it can't open the catalog file, it falls back to the strings specified in the code. Effectively, these are "C locale" strings, and you could then derive seperate "en_US" locales from them (and would, if you were smart, if you had UI people mucking with the contents of your strings for usability reasons). Let me know if there is any interest in the pre/post-processor code. Terry Lambert [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Michael C . Wu wrote: At the BSDCon I18N BOF, we discussed several things that could/should happen with the future of I18N(internationalization) in FreeBSD. We would like some inputs and comments regarding the following: SNIP 2. Needing a graphics console to display various character sets. There should be a kernel or loader option to start a graphics console by default. The magic word is option :) We have to be careful to not loose the ability to boot a bare-bone system if / when having problems. I _still_ like VAX/VMS ability to be "talked" up thru the boot process. /Johan I am willing to coordinate these things, but I would like some help. ;) Thanks, Michael -- +--+ | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | http://peorth.iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +--+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
On Thu, Oct 19, 2000 at 05:17:38PM +, Terry Lambert scribbled: | * Moving to message catalogue style error messages for the kernel and |userland. (AIX style) Each time the system outputs an error |either from the kernel or userland, the error message is a |formatted alphanumerica string mapped to verbose error messages. |The error messages can be mapped to various languages. |The advantages are : | A. Easy bug reporting by users. (e.g. "I have error 2398423") | B. I18N error messages | |The main disadvantage is that it will be a long term work |to maintain it and to keep error messages updated. | | | I have a tool which uses a macro preprocessor and macros to do | the majority of this work. It extracts messages from programs | which have macro wrapped their I/O strings, and can automatically | create XPG/4 message catalogs from them. | | I wrote this tool on my own time, but it has additions for | I can provide a version with the Whistle stuff ripped out in a | week or so, if that's considered desirable, but would prefer to | leave the code alone. Doing it this way will have a latency in Please send me the code. :) We would to have as much as possible. | Let me know if there is any interest in the pre/post-processor | code. Yes, I would be interested and wish to see it. :) Thanks, Michael -- +--+ | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | http://peorth.iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +--+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
Hi, "Michael C . Wu" [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: 1. The future of sysinstall (or whatever should replace it) The future installer/management utility should be able to handle arbitrary character sets. In other words, it should be able to display Chinese/Japanese/etc. with user selection. To be discussed. There is a difficulty in multilingual install floppy: size limitation that comes from floppy disk size (1.44M). The font file of Chinese, Japanese, Korean are very big. -- Motoyuki Konno [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (FreeBSD Project) http://www.freebsd.org/~motoyuki/ (WWW) To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
3. Itojun mentioned that the CITRUS Japanese people will be able to import the wchar* and libxpg4 changes soon. the code is there, but as i talked, we need more manpower for babysitting. cvs -d :pserver:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/anoncvs/citrus co -P xpg4dl itojun To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Re: I18N Progress, Plans, and Proposals
The advantages are : A. Easy bug reporting by users. (e.g. "I have error 2398423") B. I18N error messages Let me just say, as someone who's done "escalation tech support" for major ISVs (the people who get called whenever front-line tech support is confronted with a "I have error 2398423" question), that this can also be a tremendous pain in the butt when done wrong. Done wrong, a message catalog-using program will emit cryptic numeric errors whenever a message catalog file cannot be found or is corrupted. Done right, the program is written in such a way as to contain a default message which can also be overridden from the message catalog file if some different text is found in the appropriate language. I believe this is the way that catgets(3) currently works, but you'd be amazed how many programmers just skip providing a default message since the appropriate message catalog is always found on *their* system. There's also nothing more unreadable than code which tests a failure condition and then calls a message catalog routine with some numeric constant, the actual text of the error message being an aid to the programmer as well as the user when reading someone else's code and trying to figure out what varioups parts of it are trying to do. This isn't meant as a general criticism of your points at all, just a cautionary note. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
