Re: tlug: Redhat 6 and Japanese.

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "David" == David Walter <David.Walter@example.com> writes:

    David> Vine and Turbolinux seem to be RH-based so that rules them
    David> out, although they have built in (limited) Japanese
    David> support.

No, it doesn't matter what the package manager or the original source
is; the question is do the packages get rebuilt and tested after the
libc gets patched.  libc tends to change more slowly for say Vine or
Turbolinux because they don't have the resources to spend on research
that Red Hat does.

Another problem is that Red Hat still does not support XEmacs; it's
contrib AFAIK so Red Hat probably doesn't care enough to test it.  If
it's not even distributed by RH (Jens's URL was somewhere else, then
all bets are off).

Vine, Plamo, and TL all distribute XEmacs as part of their regular
distribution, so under normal circumstances you would not expect to
experience instant SIGSEGVs.  However, all of them will set you up
with your normal environment (including man pages, eg) as Japanese,
which may not be what you want (I don't).  Mostly it should be as
simple as putting "export LANG=POSIX" in .bashrc or .bash_profile, but
some relatively smart applications will get confused (GNU [X]Emacs, in
particular, tends to recognize EUC-JP as X11 Compound Text).

Slackware is going to be the hardest to add Japanese to, since it
doesn't have a package management system, really.

I like Debian, myself.  But I don't know if its a good way to go for
people who don't plan to make Linux, system admin, and
internationalization a hobby.  Debian's "stable" distribution really
has been stable for me.  However, it's way behind the times in terms
of number of packages and new applications.  If you can live with a
basic system you can probably do Debian stable, add a few basic
Japanese packages (which are all now integrated into the debian/main
distribution, AFAIK; there are some less useful ones which remain in
Debian-JP), and be quite well taken care of, with only very occasional 
updates.

Unfortunately, I think the next release of Debian is going to be quite 
out-of-hand; there are over 4000 packages in the database now.  I
think they may be waiting for the completion of the development of the 
next generation dpkg user interface; if not, it's just getting too big 
for dselect.

    David> Thanks for the detailed reply! I'll try building Xemacs the
    David> old-fashioned way and see if I get better results. By the
    David> way, what is a "lisp" and also what does "SUMO" stand for?

GNU Emacs (and a fortiori XEmacs) is "not an editor, it is a LISP
interpreter with special primitive types and functions that are useful 
in editing."  (LISP is a venerable language, going back to at least
1958, now and then popular in the AI community.  Its most interesting
feature is that every Lisp program is a Lisp data structure, and
therefore self-referential programs etc are easy to write.)

SUMO simply means "bulky and powerful."  The LISP packages for Emacs
are now far bigger than the core, which is as it should be.

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