Re: slang, boot-floppies, and wide character support

[Taketoshi Sano <kgh12351@nifty.ne.jp>]

Hi.

In <[🔎] 20010328180854.A1633@rano.org>,
  on Wed, 28 Mar 2001 18:08:54 +0100,
    Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.org> wrote:

> If you want Japanese and UTF-8 support on the same floppy it would be
> worth investigating whether slang1-wide could be made to work in CJK
> encodings without too much trouble, as this would avoid wasting space
> for two versions of the same library. It would also mean there would
> be a united effort in making slang1 work in arbitrary encodings which
> would probably contribute to making slang2 happen.
> 
> I would guess, based on my experience of what happened with Mutt, that
> not much extra has to be done to make slang1-wide (the patched slang1)
> support CJK encodings. But CJK speakers would have to help.

Akira Yoshiyama <yosshy@debian.or.jp> who made the patch for termwrap,
has made the customized boot-floppies for potato used on NEC pc9800
series. It uses the patched slang and newt libraries in bf-utf and it
can be used with Japanese encodings (euc-jp) using some tweaking in 
dbootstrap (euc-jp strings requires special treatment in line break,
so it uses an auxiliary utility to shrink strings correctly).

The package (in source and binary) is distributed from ftp site of
Debian JP, and I think we can use the hack in it for woody i18n 
boot-floppies.  yosshy said that he wishes to see his patches merged
into the Debian official boot-floppies, but he does not have enough
time to do it by himself.

I think we should try and see if utf-8 supported boot-floppies
can work with japanese messages in utf-8.  If it can not work, 
then perhaps we can use some tricks and will add euc-jp support 
for japanese in boot-floppies (or dbootstrap, more precisely).

One more point:

We can support i18n in root disk of boot-floppies currently, 
but since woody debconf and base-config supports i18n, it 
will be nice if we can support i18n on base system as well.

Can bogl-bterm be used for base system i18n in woody ?
Are we safe to include it in base tar ball ?
(Well, this is debootstrap topic, but it is needed for i18n
goal of Debian installation, and this experience will work
for debian-installer as well).

And if we use utf-8 for all messages, then we have to use
encoding conversion at somewhere since most packages have
messages not in utf-8 but in euc-jp for japanese.

Regards.
-- 
  Taketoshi Sano: <kgh12351@nifty.ne.jp>