bug#34215: 27.0.50; Provide elisp access to Chinese pinyin-to-character mapping

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
>> Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2019 11:18:29 -0800

I've attached a diff adding the conversion function itself, but I'm not
familiar with makefiles and so far haven't been able to figure out how
to call it. It looks like the invocation I want will look like:

$(AM_V_GEN)${RUN_EMACS} -l titdic-cnv -f pinyin-convert \
  ${srcdir}/MISC-DIC/pinyin.map ${srcdir}/../lisp/language/pinyin.el

Where ${srcdir} is the leim directory, but I don't actually know how to
get this code called by make...

Additionally, I could factor the common code in py-converter and
pinyin-convert out into a separate defsubst.

>> >> PS: pinyin.map is ancient and is missing a lot of good correspondences.
>> >> Google's pinyin input method uses a much larger map, licensed with
>> >> Apache v2.0. This[1] seems to indicate that Apache 2.0 is okay for Gnu
>> >> projects, maybe we could consider switching to that map?
>> >
>> > Maybe.  Unfortunately, I don't know enough about these input methods
>> > to tell whether replacing the file is a good idea.  I wonder who can
>> > we ask about this.
>> 
>> It's more or less a drop-in replacement -- the format of the data would
>> be the same, only a bit more of it.
>
> I understand, but I wonder if someone could try that for a while and
> see if it makes better input method(s), before we decide to import it.

FWIW, that mapping is used by the pyim package, which I believe is the
most popular pinyin-based Chinese input method out there. I also use it
via the system-wide input framework fcitx, and it works very well.

>> I'm not sure who is "in charge" of these files, though.
>
> No one, I'm afraid.  Not these days.

That's too bad.

Eric

pinyinconvert.diff
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