Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 13:19:05 -0600 From: "Michael C . Wu" <keichii@iteration.net> To: keith@freebsd.sinica.edu.tw Cc: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org, "Michael C . Wu" <keichii@iteration.net> Subject: Re: Something about ports/chinese Message-ID: <20001102131905.A13389@peorth.iteration.net> In-Reply-To: <20001102173543.A5967@bsdvm.jtjang.idv.tw>; from keith@bsdvm.jtjang.idv.tw on Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 05:35:43PM %2B0800 References: <20001102144635.B5169@bsdvm.jtjang.idv.tw> <20001102010730.B9753@peorth.iteration.net> <20001102173543.A5967@bsdvm.jtjang.idv.tw>
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On Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 05:35:43PM +0800, Jing-Tang Keith Jang scribbled:
| On 11/02/00, Michael C . Wu wrote:
| > Why do we keep maintaining outta-ports when the FreeBSD base distribution
| > has a Ports structure? The whole Ports system is full of files/patch-*
| > that can be construed as "ugly hacks." Locale fixes and patches
| > to make things compile do not really make that much of a difference.
|
| The first reason that outta-port was setup two year ago was that there
| just too painful for normal users. For example, back in that time,
| if you want to fully utilize Netscape, these steps are necessary:
|
| Install chinese/big5fonts, modify font.alias's encoding from big5.eten to big5
[snip]
| Use xcin25 or old xcin2.3+xa+cv to input Big5, please see another Howto :)
I know :)
| It just scared away many potential ordinary users. Not everyone uses
| FreeBSD only as powerful servers, it can be a desktop for daily use, just
| a lot of tuning is involved for Big5 computing. They eventually turned to
| CLE(Chinese Linux Extention), which has all the mess and hacks builtin. :-)
I know :)
| One of outta-port's goals was to automate these mess. In addition, many
| of these has a lifetime that is so short we can even predict when it is
| not needed, like X.language and xa+cv. If we put them in ports/chinese,
| it's possible that they become obsolete very quickly. There were 2500-3000
| ports in the base system, and it's unreasonable to add soon-to-be-dead ones.
We can leave them in the tree for old system users
| The second reason was that we didn't like the way ports/{japanese,korean}
| goes. I really admire and appreciate the pioneer I18N work by these groups,
| and often sees them as my best references. But it's also true that the
| port layout is mixed in the worst case. There are no j/x11* or j/print,
| but they are all put together in the same directory instead. Although
| outta-port didn't deal with this efficiently(just decreases the number in
| ports/chinese) and it seems now that ports/chinese also goes in the same way
| inevitably, this is a problem we eventually have to face, unless more ports
| become I18N-compliant. :-)
I am afraid that the Japanese and Korean guys are doing this the best
way that I can think of.
(Btw, I know what you meant by "didn't like the way ports/{j,k} goes",
but I think we should not say "don't like." It is more of "we do not
agree," and probably conveys your meaning better than "we don't like."
| But time is changing. With more and more applications following I18N
| standards, it's conceivable that outta-port should be integrated into
| ports/chinese. I think it's the right direction.
So we are agreed then. 8-)
| > IMHO, some outta-ports ports are clean enough, especially your own ports,
| > Keith. :) If it compiles and it runs, why can we not have it in the
| > Ports? ports/chinese/mutt has hacks too, and so does chinese/big5con.
| > What defines a "clean" patchset?
| If it compiles and runs and useless like xfig and lyx, I won't consider
| them as good ports/chinese candidates. :-) They can only accept Chinese
| character input, but without good TeX or PS font backends, displaying is
| the best they can do.
Yes, let's import only the "useful" ones.
| If it has hacks but works like CJK/big5fs/arphicttf, I think it deserves
| a ports/chinese seat. big5fs will definitely be obsolete once kernel
| iconv fs interface is out, but it's quite useful for the time being.
| > Would sending stuff into the FreeBSD Ports give our "hacks"
| > a better chance of getting reviewed? Certainly there are many many
| > more people that can review the ports if we allow them a easy
| > way of reviewing them. Keith had to explain what outta-ports
| > is just right above my reply. Should we not let other language
| > groups review our progress?
|
| It seems like I'm an stubborn oldman who doesn't share his magic flying
| blanket. :-)
A good example of how we took from ports/japanese is chinese/big5con
from japanese/kons25.
| I only explained the validity of outta-port in the past. I agree with
| the integration, but not just dumping all of them to ports/chinese.
No, no one ever proposed such a thing, we proposed merging the useful
outta-ports into ports/chinese.
| > The FreeBSD system is monolithic, we do not want to fork and fork
| > over and over again like Linux. If every language locale group
| > had its own "outta-ports," imagine the users and maintainers' difficulty
| > of keeping up with them all.
|
| Don't blame outta-port. Blame those people who invented the shitty Big5
| encoding, which follows no standards like ISO2022 and Unicode, and makes
| Big5-ization harder in nature.
| And also blame those companies who make it popular. :-)
Bah, I've given up on trying to get dumb companies and in-duh-viduals
to follow standards.
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| keichii@peorth.iteration.net | keichii@bsdconspiracy.net |
| http://peorth.iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. |
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