[comp.sys.next] Japanese NeXTstep

me@spirea.UiB.NO (My Account) (02/20/91)

Hi.

>Does anyone knows about the Japanese release of NeXTstep. 2.0?  I have heard
>somewhere that there will be a release, but I know none of the specifics.  How
>does one go about getting it and does it provide full kanji support?  Are there
>any statements about software releases for it?  If anyone knows anything about
>it please e-mail to the address below.  Thanks in advance.
>
>
>Doksu Moon '91
>Princeton University
>dmoon@phoenix.princeton.edu

I've been in contact with NeXT Tech support in Asia...

	"From:    <C=no;PRMD=com;O=NEXT;S="Yuichi Itoda">
To:      <C=no;PRMD=uninett;O=uib;OU=cc;S=ppstl>
Subject: Re: Kanji NeXT step.
 
Hi,
 
As Henry says, I received your note about Kanji stuff.  Please send me your mail
for update if I'm not getting back to you.  It will be available, hopefully, soon.
 
        Yuichi Itoda
        NeXT Technical Support, Asia"	

I would also expect that a fellow by the name of Marc Crispin ("Gaijin"-foreigner) has a good idea of whats happening in that area.  He posts here often.



His e-mail address is: mrc@cac.washington.edu
You could also try NeXus, the Japanese NeXT users group.
They can be contacted at teh following addresses:
	NeXus-office@etl.go.jp
	ohashi@sunrise.ocean.juice (or .jp)

Hope this helps.
--
Thor-Lee Legvold                 |         ppstl@nobergen.earn (or .bitnet)
University of Bergen             |         ppstl@cc.uib.no
NORWAY                                |        and now on NeXT...
Hvor mye for datter'n din...? |        me@fiol.uib.no

youki@newmars.ics.osaka-u.ac.jp (Youki Kadobayashi) (06/29/91)

>>>>> On 28 Jun 91 09:56:29 GMT, izumi@mindseye.berkeley.edu (Izumi Ohzawa) said:

> Is 2.1J actually shipping in Japan now?  If not, are
> you speaking of experiences with a pre-release copy?

I'm speaking of both 2.0J beta and 2.1J beta. FYI, some review
articles are also available on Japanese magazine "Super ASCII" (all
articles are written in Japanese). "Super ASCII" is targeted toward
high-end PC and personal workstation users.

>>	BuildDisk (file system is incompatible)
>>
>>The incompatibility of file system is serious problem if you have both
>>SR 2.1 and SR 2.1J and they are net-less; you can't mount 2.1J's OD on
>>2.1.

> This is very bad.  
> Why did they have to mess with the filesystem format?

I don't know. Please ask Canon; FAX +81-44-549-5462 for NeXT SE.
My guess is that they modified file system to make it 8-bit clean
so that users can use Kanji filename. (I never used this feature,
but someone from DOSsy world actually did..)

> Please elaborate on this.  Does it go backward? That is,
> can you mount 2.1 OD/floppy on 2.1J system and do read/write?

Yes. In other words, 2.1J file system is upward compatible to 2.1.

> If so, is the disk written on 2.1J (but initialized on 2.1)
> still mountable on 2.1 system?

Yes. I've tried this between 1.0 and 2.0J; it worked fine.

> How about the compatibility of NetInfo config server/clients.
> Can 2.1 NetInfo config server serve 2.1J clients?

I can't say anything about this; since we don't have standard 2.1.
When we were upgrading cubes to 2.0J, we had mixed configuration (i.e. 
1.0 and 2.0J); it seemed to work. From my experience so far, Canon
has made no local modification on NetInfo, I think.

And some more important topic:

1. Canon should make their Japanese-OS specific documents available via
   FTP. There are many international-minded guys who wants to support
   Japanese in their Apps. Of course they must be written in English.

2. All programs which interact with data streams (e.g. files, network
   streams) should provide a hook for filter; because Japanese standard
   kanji code is JIS, and alas, Canon adopted EUC as *their* standard.
   As a result, Japanese NeXTmail converts EUC to JIS each time it
   sents out mail, and converts JIS to EUC each time it gets incoming
   mail. More generic mechanism (i.e. NXGetDefaultValue, popen,
   and NXOpenStream. sample code will be posted soon) would be better,
   I think.

--
Youki Kadobayashi
Information Network Architecture Lab.
Dept. of Info. and Comp. Sci, Osaka University, Japan

izumi@mindseye.berkeley.edu (Izumi Ohzawa) (06/29/91)

In article <YOUKI.91Jun29030220@newmars.ics.osaka-u.ac.jp> 
youki@newmars.ics.osaka-u.ac.jp (Youki Kadobayashi) writes:
>
>> Please elaborate on this.  Does it go backward? That is,
>> can you mount 2.1 OD/floppy on 2.1J system and do read/write?
>
>Yes. In other words, 2.1J file system is upward compatible to 2.1.
>
>> If so, is the disk written on 2.1J (but initialized on 2.1)
>> still mountable on 2.1 system?
>
>Yes. I've tried this between 1.0 and 2.0J; it worked fine.


Great!  This is then quite tolerable, if  2.1J has a means of
initializing disk in 2.1 compatible format (e.g.,  buttons
on a panel that pops up when initializing a disk.)

I guess NeXT will/should adopt 2.1J format for all its disks
in 3.0?

>And some more important topic:
>
>1. Canon should make their Japanese-OS specific documents available via
>   FTP. There are many international-minded guys who wants to support
>   Japanese in their Apps. Of course they must be written in English.

Agreed.
And they should make their OS available ASAP at 60,000yen or less
in the rest of the world.  In fact, the availability of the OS
and docs in Japanese should come first, and should not be
delayed awaiting English documentation.

At last Tuesday's Developer SIG of BaNG, -=EPS=- (Eric P Scott of
San Francisco State U) asked guidelines on what to do/what not to do
for developing applications that could be easily adapted to
languages with multi-byte character set.
The author of Text object, Brian Yamamoto, couldn't answer that
question well, except to say that NeXT and other sillicon valley
companies seem to be adopting Unicode for these things.
[Thank you Brian, and Ali Ozer for enlightening talks!]

Well, it seems, authors of Text object for 2.1J are in the
best position to answer that question since the Japanese Text object
is already there.  If extensive Japanese-OS specific documents
written in English are not coming soon, AT THE LEAST, they should
compile a quick rule set on "what to do/what not to do to
make your application easily portable to Japanese environment".
This will prevent emergence of apps like WriteNow, which I
heard can't be ported and won't be ported to Japanese OS.
They should do this as soon as possible before massive
amount of apps are written without any regard for multi-byte
character set.
Unicode is fine, but we have more immediate need for what we
already got, and that won't go away any time soon.


Izumi Ohzawa             [ $@Bg_78^=;(J ]
USMail: University of California, 360 Minor Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
Telephone: (415) 642-6440             Fax:  (415) 642-3323
Internet: izumi@violet.berkeley.edu   NeXTmail: izumi@pinoko.berkeley.edu