gaim & japanese
So, a few days ago, I kinda forced my wife to use gaim instead of using both MSN Messenger and ICQ on her computer. While it has the advantage of integrating every protocol she was using (plus the bonus of having access to jabber, now), it has some flaws on UI usability, and, more importantly, for japanese transmissions.
One could argue about this choice, but well, this is the only multi-protocol and jabber client I know that has been ported to Windows. Besides, it's the one I use on my Debian desktop.
I knew that gaim had some issues with mojibake, because I experienced them. One of them is when you receive messages while offline. The messages coming at login time are all mojibake. While it can be annoying, it doesn't happen that often, so...
But here, there was one I never experienced, for a simple reason : I don't use MSN. And here is the big problem : everything in MSN is just mojibake, which is, well, very annoying.
There I was, forcing people to use free software that doesn't work like expected. But hey, I told my friend Google something like "gaim MSN æ–‡å—化ã‘", and guess what ? I found a patch, addressing some mojibake issues, including the MSN one, and some other japanese related issues (such as shortcuts conflicting with input methods keys...) !
Next step was to actually build the stuff. Pervert as I like to be, I tried to used cygwin under wine to cross-compile it. Didn't do the trick... bash doesn't even want to start. Since I didn't really want to spend that much time to figure out all the possible ways to cross-compile for windows under linux, I just went to the easy solution : building directly under Windows, following the build instructions. If you want to do it by yourself, be aware that you have to use the standalone MinGW, even the one provided with cygwin won't work, believe the build instructions.
If you can't or don't want to build gaim for Windows by yourself, you can get the installer for the patched version. And if you're a Debian user, you can also get the package.
The strange thing about this patch is that it's being maintained for a long time, and never got applied upstream to fix these mojibake issues. Why ? Maybe they just never heard of it... I'll try to drop them a note.
2005-08-21 12:10:58+0900
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2005-08-21 12:43:02+0900
hi, another option could have been to use miranda or probably exodus, they are both free software and multi-protocol windows clients, and i suppose better integrated in windows than gaim (not that i dislike gaim, i use it regularly)
2005-08-21 17:22:44+0900
I didn’t know both of them. But exodus seems to be jabber only (though there are gateways, but it’s not that convenient), and miranda seems to have an outdated japanese localisation. And nothing indicates that they have any better support for japanese messages and stuff ;)
Anyways, thanks for the references.
2005-08-22 17:59:36+0900
(Speaking as an admittedly biased gaim upstream developer) Miranda sucks, it has the reputation (among im client developers at least) of being the single most broken client that people will actualyl use.
As for the patch, I do not recall ever seeing it in our patch tracker or on our gaim-devel mailing list. I still don’t (see it).
Looking at the patch, there are some things wrong with it, that I’m commmenting about here since the site is entirely japanese, which I can’t read. Hopefully they can be passed on the the patch’s author.
on a pendantic note, since its something I can fix myself, the patch uses // style comments, that cannot go into gaim, as it won’t work with many compilers (notably our solaris users will complain).
on a more realistic note, much of this patch is spent changing the accelerators for menu items. this is wasted effort as already in the 1.x series of gaim, you can add a single line to your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file and then change the accelerators in gaim yourself, rather than just removing them as this patch does. Moreover, your changed accelerators will be saved. see gaim.sf.net/gtkrc-2.0 for some more detail on this. (some of that file is 2.0.0 specific, where there will be even more support for changing accelerators than exists in 1.x).
Part of this patch is changing a hard coded default from “Helvetica” to “Sans” yet this default should only be used when your gtk theme (again, the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (which might not exist, esp. if you don’t use gnome)) does not provide a default font.
he does change some font defaults that may be gaim-specific, but I think, at least starting with 2.0.0 if not yet, these should be reachable by a ~/.gtkrc-2.0 as well (though probably not by simply setting a theme).
lastly, he does some stuff to irc, msn,and oscar (aim/icq). that part of the patch looks interesting and I’ll be passing it around to those developers who deal more with the internals of these protocols.
2005-08-22 18:29:35+0900
Thanks Luke for the analysis of the patch, I must admit i haven’t really looked into it myself, I was more interested by the “it just works” part ;)
I’ll try to pass your comments to the patch author when i’ll get some time.