On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 01:25, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
FARSI.
Yes.
;-)
Disclaimer 1: This is not a Persian vs Farsi war message.
Disclaimer 2: CC to FarsiWeb list is just informational.
Disclaimer 3: The attached code is not in Public Domain.
Disclaimer 4: This is a long boring message. Your own risk.
Two long years ago, is such a day that today is, perhaps in the
same wee hours in the morning but in Tehran time, I have been
polishing and wrapping up some piece of code that is has been
called farsi since then.
The story still goes more back. Should have been in late 2000
that Roozbeh Pournader wrote some C code to convert Unicode
Persian text to some legacy character set called iransystem. As
a requirement for that, he wrote the joining code that was later
used by me in farsi.
Late 2001, my major work on FriBidi has been done, so was the
time to use what I have been doing. Took Roozbeh's code, cleaned
up, plugged FriBidi, and it was what you get as farsi/fjoining/.
I wrote some more code to fill the gap in console to handle
harakats, and called it farsi/fconsole, and finally grabbed
source code from script(1), hacked a few lines, and called it
farsi/fcon. With the helpf of font tools I borrowed from another
project and keyboard driver I wrote down, I had finally done my
pet called farsi that was doing me more than Akka was able to
do (for me as a Persian).
Since then the code got some clean up and some features added,
but nothing else changed, even the user base itself that was
limited to me, myself, and behdad. The package named farsi was
still waiting for me (and Roozbeh) to resolve the copyright
status and get released, while I lost my interest in bidi console
and it wend down into my 10GB archive of last (lost) files.
Fortunately I did three small releases of the code, first on a
local list called 'farsidev' that does not exist today anymore
(and I cannot remember even. Just wrote it in my ChangeLog in
the package); next in a list in Hebrew community, and last in
ArabEyes. Seems that the last one is the only one that has been
survived history.
This is the history about farsi in five paragraphs. I also
hacked a Red Hat 7.2 to enable Persian on console. I later took
some notes of what I did, and implemented it on another machine
from my notes. The notes are in farsiredhat directory in archive
attached to this mail. Note that they are pretty old. Many
things have changed these days.
For the past few days I have been known as the most blocker of
the whole ArabEyes project ;-). So I first answer the questions
I was asked about farsi, and then go through the files in
attached archive.
Muhammad Alkarouri wrote:
Thanks Behdad for your reply. I would like to know,
though, what is the expected timeframe of including
joining in fribidi.
2005. No more, no less ;-).
Seriously, this winter.
Another question for all:
- do you know any problem that affects using farsi
besides bidi before joining and shaping codes, and
some may be next stage points like interaction with
gpm and ncurses programs?
In the future, ncurses should implement its own bidi/shaping.
But before that, both ncurses and gpm need to get some stable
Unicode support. I am supposed to have a look at Unicode support
in ncurses after I'm satisfied with GNOME (FriBidi, Pango, GTK+,
AbiWord), but most probably it's not before 2005.
If there aren't I will base any future work on this
code rather than the akka original.
:D.
Nadim Shakili wrote:
A couple of questions though,
1. Can we take this conversation to Arabeyes' developer
mailing-list ? I'm sure we'll want to refer back to
all these points in the future.
Sure.
2. Can we come up with an alternate name to this package.
Akka 2.0 (with no mention of the previous work or credits) ?
suggestions ? Behdad, its your baby, so its your call.
Well, farsi is not such a bad name as long as it's used in
English written text ;-). Ok, it has proved to be a bad name.
Perhaps 'farsi' is a good name, but again in written context.
BTW, you should not need that word in English; one should always
use Persian to refer to the language.
Second, it's the Free World (as in Free Beer) of Free Software
(as in Freedom) ;-). Feel Free to Fu^^Hack the code. (Free as
in Freedom, not as in Beer. Don't forget my Beer).
Akka 2.0, may make up a good name. I too prefer not binding a
new name to the same functionality. Perhaps we would want to
give some hints and credit to pre-2.0 Akka. Roozbeh?
I'm fine with Akka, if on your website and the main README file,
you write it this way:
Akka (aka farsi)
Another idea comes to my mind, about popping another name. Just
take the middle and call it 'baghdad'? ;-).
3. Can we, once 12 above are agreed upon, release this code
so that its archived somewhere. From what I remember, the
