Re: this all this xxx-jp nonsense (was: Re: ITP: grep-ja)

[Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>]

From: Wichert Akkerman <wakkerma@cs.leidenuniv.nl>
Subject: this all this xxx-jp nonsense (was: Re: ITP: grep-ja)
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 14:39:03 +0200

> I seriously object to this. I do not think that forking all packages in
> Debian and creating -jp-package is the right way to go. What should be
> done is submit patches to the maintainers, preferably both Debian and
> upstream. What I was hoping to see with the integration of Debian-JP
> is that all the multibyte patches would be *integrated* with Debian,
> not a senseless forking of lots of packages.

I think you see many ITP's of xxx-jp in this mailing list and 
think it is non-sense. But they are not so simple story.

For example, I am not a Debian developer so have never
ITP'ed any xxx-jp yet. But I reported BTS about several packages
on multi-byte problems.

tcsh was soon adopt my proposal and now we can use tcsh-kanji
with KANJI support and recently xfig also became of I18N.
(To tell the truth, xfig was done mainly by Sano san :)

Note that tcsh is separated to tcsh for non multi-byte users and
tcsh-kanji for multi-byte users !!

On the other hands, I reported xearth to merge patch and lynx to 
compile with --enable-nls option but it seems no response yet.

# Please do not think I blame on the maintainers of the packages.
# I only want to point out the difficulty of real integration.

Much recently I reported a2ps to merge patch and the maintainer
responded immediately but the real work is not started yet because
there may be problems for non multi-byte users.

How do you think about these situations ?

I do not do forking xxx-jp but try to do integrating as Akkerman
recommended. And the integrating may be not so simple as non multi-byte
users think.

These filings to BTS are probably not noticed by you all and only 
ITP's of xxx-jp may stand out and there may be disturbance temporarily
but please be patient.

I believe that JP does not want to do forking at all but strongly
want to do integrating as Akkerman recommended.

Thanks in advance,		1999.8.31

--
 Debian JP Developer - much more I18N of Debian
 Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>
 Department of Math., Tokushima Univ.