OpenBSD Journal

Internationalization Ready for Testing

Contributed by jose on from the multiple-language-support dept.

One of the biggest challenges facing many would-be OpenBSD users around the world is the lack of support for proper internationalization. This is available in Linux and other BSD projects, but has been lacking in OpenBSD. We've run stories on this before ( 2002 , and 2003 ).

Kevin Lo, an OpenBSD developer, has been working on a patch of the Citrus framework for OpenBSD's C library. This patch is rather large and will require extensive testing and adaptation to make it work properly (regular, traditional material should be OK). Kevin's diff is available on his website and should work against -current. To use it, you'll have to:

  • 1. in /usr/src, make includes
  • 2. cd /usr/src/share/mk && make install
  • 3. in /usr/src, make build
Please have a look at this and start testing it, adopting software to work with it and the like and report bugs to Kevin. He's especially interested in Southeast Asian language support with this, but global support will be needed for this to be truly effective.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By DVV () on bgbug.berlios.de/howto/bgcons_34.html

    Thanks guys!!! I love you.The url above was a hack by zhware.Now with the new patch in the system all looks massive.I will move on current soon to test it.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      Not Found
      The requested URL /howto/bgcons_34.html was not found on this server.

      Apache/1.3.27 Server at bgbug.berlios.de Port 80

      Comments

      1. By dvv () on

        http://bgbug.berlios.de/docs/howto/openbsd/bgcon_34.html - this is the exact url. my bad. the howto is in Bulgarian, however the general instructions are in English. Switch to cp1251 to view the language in letters, not in `?`

  2. By Chad Loder () on

    there's so many of them to choose from.

    It seems like i18n and Citrus will be acting according to various standards for i18n...there's POSIX/susv2 (what aboutsusv3) plus C99. Is this going to be a problem for the Citrus folks? Or is this going to move OpenBSD closer to C99?

    Comments

    1. By Marc Espie () on

      C99 is a mid-term goal.
      There are various things you can't half-do:
      as soon as you start behaving a bit like C99, a lot of configure tests will start kicking in, and stuff will break if the rest of C99 is not there.

      New integer types, wide chars support, locale support are all part of that.

      Things are currently moving in the right direction.

      Between locale and the pending gcc 3.3.2 update, those are pretty big changes. Don't expect them in OpenBSD 3.5. If testing is adequate, these might make OpenBSD 3.6.

  3. By Kevin Lo () kevlo@kevlo.org on mailto:kevlo@kevlo.org

    I made the screen shot:
    http://www.kevlo.org/citrus/locale-test.jpg
    This is rxvt + xcin(Chinese input method)

  4. By Pedro Martelletto () on

    I would like to strongly encourage people to test this patch, once the contribution it can make to OpenBSD users throughout the world is enormous. For now, it needs lots and lots of testing. Make your contribution by sending feedbacks to kevlo@.

    The correct steps to build it are:

    1. cd /usr/src/share/mk && make install.
    2. cd /usr/src && make includes.
    3. cd /usr/src && make beforeinstall.
    4. cd /usr/src/lib/libc && make depend && make && make install.
    5. cd /usr/src/usr.bin/{mklocale,mkesdb,mkcsmapper}, run make && make install.
    6. cd /usr/src && make build.

    I was able to build it with no problems and, up to this moment, it is working as expected.

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