bug#3455: A solution for a problem with TAMAGO (egg) package for I18N input under emacs 23

[ishikawa]

Hi,

Thank you for making the great package available.

I have been testing emacs 23.0.94 for the last couple of days.

I am reporting a problem with an elisp package, TAMAGO, and a fix for it for
wider dissemination of the patch available for it.

I wish the information about the problem and the readily available fix is
incorporated into etc/NEWS file.

Backgrond:

With emacs 23.0.94, I noticed a problem with an elisp package called TAMAGO
(egg in Japanese) for I18N input.
I use it mostly for Japanese input.
With the widely available TAMAGO 4.0.6 distribution, which I use,
I can't input Japanese any more using emacs 23.0.94.

This is fixed by a patch posted a couple of years ago (in 2007) on
a mailing list which I found out yesterday.

The reported problem here is with this package, namely TAMAGO(egg), not
emacs 23.0.xx per se. But when I searched for the information about the
problem, the information is rather scarce. I found out some early Japanese
would-be testers of 23.0.xx reverted to emacs 22 version since they could
not use Japanese input any more using tamago(egg) package.

Given that there are many emacs users in Japan, and old timers like me seem
to use TAMAGO(egg) for Japanese input,
you might want to put the following info in etc/NEWS
to notify the potential problem and to avoid the extraneous
bug reports or questions.

I am afraid that the TAMAGO mailing list is not widely read these days.
And as far as I can tell, Tamago 4.0.6 seems to be the up-to-date version
that is made available to public. With the official release of emacs 23.1,
Mr. Handa et al may release the updated TAMAGO, but for now, we need the patch.

===========================
Problem with an tamago(egg) elisp package for I18N input

With emacs 23, there are changes in I18N character handling and
the changes break tamago(egg) Japanese input.

The problem is that when a user loads TAMAGO package, and sets it up so that
emacs will talk to Wnn input server, and tries to
input Japanese, the backend reports that (input) candidate  list
could not be created.
(The error appears in Japanese message. The above is my translation.)

Fix:

We should apply the patch reported in the following mailing list article
and (byte-) recompile egg-com.el using emacs 23.xx.

The following article is written in Japanese.

http://www.m17n.org/mlarchive/mule-ja/200703/msg00018.html

(Yes, it was posted more than two years ago.)

Caveat:

The fix modifies the egg-com.el file to use the new I18N function available
in emacs 23.xx only, and not available in emacs 22. So once the user
re-compile egg-com.el after applying the above patch,
the elc files can't be used for emacs 22 even if you decide to
byte-recompile the files using emacs22.

BTW, I am sure that TAMAGO needs
separate patch for each language it supports. Japanese input is taken care
of by the above patch.I wonder what changes are required for other languages
such as Korean
supported by TAMAGO package. But the change in the Japanese input patch
seemsto be rather straight-forward and so similar patches for other
languages can be written, I suppose.


That is all.

Thank you again for the great package.

Happy Hacking,
CI