On 20 Apr 2008, at 6:38 pm, Norbert Preining wrote:
Dear Jonathan, I know your time is rather limited, and I want to excuse myself for asking again something from you ... we got a bug report asking for Sinhala language support in XeTeX, together with a patch.
Please don't apologise - it's a legitimate question! I know Sinhala was not supported in earlier ICU versions, so I can understand the desire to do something about this.
Could you give the patch (attached) a short glance and tell me what youthink? Ok for inclusion into the TeX Live 2007 packages for Debian? Do you believe that it will interfer in any way with the rest?If you have the *smallest* doubts let me know and I will leave that outand it will be fixed with TL2008, but in case you think the attached patch is clean I will include it in XeTeX.
I'm not really able to review and test the patch in the next few days - probably not until after BachoTeX, realistically. Although the patch is probably safe, it's hard for me to be completely certain without some more checking. But I don't know if your schedule allows you to leave it unresolved for that long....
In any case, it looks like this patch does not address the issues in <http://bugs.icu-project.org/trac/ticket/6232>; I notice it includes SF_MPRE_FIXUP in the SINH_SCRIPT_FLAGS, one of the things that is specifically mentioned as a problem in that report. As such, it may not be a completely satisfactory solution.
Because of that ICU ticket, I believe that even the current XeTeX trunk, using ICU 3.8.1, may still have some problems with Sinhala. I considered applying the patch from that report, but prefer to wait until it has been reviewed and accepted by the ICU team, as this is a fairly complex area and I don't know the code that well. The report specifically asks for some points to be reviewed/checked, and this has not yet been done, AFAICT.
I'm finding it difficult to decide what answer to give you - my instinct is to say that the patch is OK, even if not 100% complete, but I have not applied and tested it, and so I'm just a little hesitant. What is your deadline for a final decision?
Jonathan