From owner-freebsd-ports Thu Nov 2 11:19: 7 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from peorth.iteration.net (peorth.iteration.net [208.190.180.178]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1DCF237B479 for ; Thu, 2 Nov 2000 11:19:02 -0800 (PST) Received: by peorth.iteration.net (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 819265730B; Thu, 2 Nov 2000 13:19:05 -0600 (CST) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 13:19:05 -0600 From: "Michael C . Wu" To: keith@freebsd.sinica.edu.tw Cc: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org, "Michael C . Wu" Subject: Re: Something about ports/chinese Message-ID: <20001102131905.A13389@peorth.iteration.net> Reply-To: "Michael C . Wu" Mail-Followup-To: "Michael C . Wu" , keith@freebsd.sinica.edu.tw, freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org References: <20001102144635.B5169@bsdvm.jtjang.idv.tw> <20001102010730.B9753@peorth.iteration.net> <20001102173543.A5967@bsdvm.jtjang.idv.tw> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20001102173543.A5967@bsdvm.jtjang.idv.tw>; from keith@bsdvm.jtjang.idv.tw on Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 05:35:43PM +0800 X-PGP-Fingerprint: 5025 F691 F943 8128 48A8 5025 77CE 29C5 8FA1 2E20 X-PGP-Key-ID: 0x8FA12E20 Sender: owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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. -- +------------------------------------------------------------------+ | keichii@peorth.iteration.net | keichii@bsdconspiracy.net | | http://peorth.iteration.net/~keichii | Yes, BSD is a conspiracy. | +------------------------------------------------------------------+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message