On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 08:33:34PM +0900, YASUOKA Masahiko wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 17 Mar 2016 10:42:21 -0600
> "Anthony J. Bentley" <anth...@anjbe.name> wrote:
> > Marc Espie writes:
> >> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 12:00:47AM -0600, Anthony J. Bentley wrote:
> >> > I'm concerned about this port, though. It's an unmaintained ISO-2022
> >> > patchset on top of less-332, which was released in *1997*. The patches
> >> > no longer exist except on our mirrors. Have there been any
> >> > vulnerabilities in less in the past 19 years? Do the patches introduce
> >> > any?
> >> > 
> >> > It seems like it might be worthwhile for jless users to alias it to
> >> > "iconv -f iso-2022-jp -t utf-8 | less", and see if it acts as a
> >> > reasonable approximation.
> >> > 
> >> > I'm very concerned about keeping such an old, unmaintained fork in
> >> > our tree, when the original software has since grown its own support
> >> > for Japanese. I have similar concerns about kterm (1996 xterm),
> >> > jvim (1996 vim), ja-groff (1995 groff), hanterm-xf (2003 xterm)...
> >> 
> >> I don't know. Japanese is slightly peculiar, and they sometimes have needs
> >> that haven't gotten to the 21st century... 
> >> 
> >> keeping a toolchain that works with JIS/SJIS encoding probably makes some
> >> sense.
> >> 
> >> Analogy with western countries: we just switched to utf8 by default less
> >> than a release ago.  before that, a lot of people, me included were still
> >> mostly working with iso-8859-*
> > 
> > I do understand. But I'm very leery of promoting such old, old software.
> > I'm not convinced that we're doing anybody a favor by keeping these ports
> > around. If 20-year-old packages exist under japanese/, that's an implicit
> > endorsement that "to set up a Japanese environment, you need to use this
> > special terminal with a special encoding that nothing else on the system
> > uses." I saw this happen even last year on misc@. That is a bad thing to
> > promote, because there is no future for ISO-2022 or Shift-JIS on OpenBSD.
> > 
> > By analogy, we used to have nvi-m17n in ports. But it turns out the nvi
> > port supported the same encodings and more; and has a somewhat maintained
> > upstream. It was worth removing nvi-m17n and encouraging people to use
> > nvi instead.
> > 
> > I understand that people sometimes, even frequently, need to work with
> > non-UTF encodings. But you can get that effect on OpenBSD with a UTF-8
> > locale and using iconv on incoming and outgoing data. I've been doing
> > so for Japanese and European content for over six years.
> > 
> > Base xterm works natively with Japanese text out of the box; you don't
> > even need to install any fonts. And if you have to, you can even run
> > Shift-JIS/ISO-2022 software directly in xterm using luit(1). Promoting
> > use of a parallel xterm with a parallel less and a parallel vim, all
> > unmaintained for decade after decade after decade, is *harmful*.
> 
> I totally agree your opinion.  I'd like to help removing old Japanese
> ports and guide people to use newer tools.
> 
> But I myself don't use any japanese/* already.  So I need to learn the
> reasons why some people are still using japanese/* for this moment.
> 
> --yasuoka
> 

I use jserver/kinput2 because it works with cwm and I can run it on a legacy 
i386 system and connect over ssh from an amd64 machine (I was hoping the new 
vmd development work would help there, but i386 support seems a way off). The 
new UTF-8 desktop settings in -current work OK for me to display UTF-8 fonts, 
it is just the occasional inputting of kanji that I need something for. If 
someone can show how to use uim/anthy with cwm in a non-root manner I would be 
grateful. 

uim does have appeal because it supports a wide range of languages and I would 
like something for Chinese, too.

Peter

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