Arch Linux

gammel.holte

Member

Registered: 2010-02-01

Posts: 53

Problem with remind calendar utility

Hi all,

I'm in the process of migrating to Arch from OS X. I've chosen remind as an iCal replacement. It's very Unix-like and I like it.

However, I'm experiencing some little annoyances I'd like to solve.

1. I cannot get Remind to process correctly non-ASCII chars on the calendar view. That is, if I use remind -c .reminders and .remainders contains e.g.: "REM 12 March 2010 MSG Reunión", the plotted calendar displays correctly all the chars (in particular ó), but the cells of the table are drawn incorrectly. Apparently default builds of remind support ISO-8859-1, so I don't know whats going on.

2. remind Arch package depends on tk, for the X interface, which I won't be using. Is there any way to remove that dependency?

I've searched for solutions quite a lot without success. Moreover, remind user list refuses to sign me up...

Thanks in advance.

skanky

Member

From: WAIS

Registered: 2009-10-23

Posts: 1,847

Re: Problem with remind calendar utility

1. I've just reproduced it - and haven't found a workaround. The author of remind is on the mailing list so that's always a good place to check. There is a new version out now (not yet in the repos), but the change list doesn't seem to mention this issue, so it probably doesn't fix it (if it is a bug). Also, you could try compiling remind with your language support (it's a compile time setting)?

TBH I'm quite surprised by it as I'm sure (from the mailing list) that there are plenty of non-native English speakers who use remind.

A quick look at the code (and I'm not C programmer, **so this may be way off**, but I think that it may be down to a combination of using utf8 and the remind code using putchar and incrementing the char counter. The string contains a mixture of single and double byte chars. The single byte ones are handled no problem, but the double byte ones, though printed okay mean the character count integer does not get incremented enough, so every extended character results in one less space being used to pad out the line. This *suggests* that the language setting may not have an effect.

It might be worth trying it on a system that's not using utf8?

2. Check out the ABS: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS

It's also possible to get the source from Roaring Penguin and build it.

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"...one cannot be angry when one looks at a penguin."  - John Ruskin
"Life in general is a bit shit, and so too is the internet. And that's all there is." - scepticisle

gammel.holte

Member

Registered: 2010-02-01

Posts: 53

Re: Problem with remind calendar utility

Thanks for your reply.

1. I finally got admitted into the remind-fans mailing list last night (mailman was slow sending me the confirmation). I found a thread mentioning the issue. The weird thing is that the bug is acknowledged and a patch is suggested, but it looks like the patch was never merged into the official repo:
http://www.mail-archive.com/remind-fans … 00097.html

Besides, there's a simple workaround. Change the input / output coding from / to utf8 using recode (see msg 2 of the thread linked above):
echo "rem [trigger(realtoday())] msg testäöü" | recode utf8..latin1 |
remind -c+ - | recode latin1..utf8

2. Yes, I know I can build it using ABS / from source. But shouldn't the tcl tk deps be optional instead of mandatory just like in vanilla remind?

skanky

Member

From: WAIS

Registered: 2009-10-23

Posts: 1,847

Re: Problem with remind calendar utility

Hadn't noticed the bit about the remind list in first post, sorry.

1) Nice to know that I read it right. Odd that the bug hasn't been fixed - I didn't loom that far back as there have been a number of releases since then. You could request a fix again?

2) You could remove the unwanted dependencies manually (pacman -R), but pacman will want to put them back when you update, I think. If you think they are optional dependencies, then I believe that the standard procedure is to raise a bug report and request that they be made optional. I've no idea how successful you'll be seeing as tkremind is installed with "vanilla" remind, though.

EDIT Might want to point out the relative sizes of tcl (8.6MB), tk (5.1MB) & remind (356k) in the bug report?

Last edited by skanky (2010-03-11 14:35:52)

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"...one cannot be angry when one looks at a penguin."  - John Ruskin
"Life in general is a bit shit, and so too is the internet. And that's all there is." - scepticisle

gammel.holte

Member

Registered: 2010-02-01

Posts: 53

Re: Problem with remind calendar utility

Thanks for your helpful hints.

1. I'll ping remind dev to see what's happening with utf-8 support.

2. Besides, I'll file a bug / RFE asking whether tcl and tk should be optional deps.

Greetings from Denmark!

skanky

Member

From: WAIS

Registered: 2009-10-23

Posts: 1,847

Re: Problem with remind calendar utility

Hope I was of some use.
Good luck.

---

"...one cannot be angry when one looks at a penguin."  - John Ruskin
"Life in general is a bit shit, and so too is the internet. And that's all there is." - scepticisle

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: Problem with remind calendar utility

Something to note - the Arch remind package is built with only one ./configure option i.e. --prefix=/usr, which means that all other options remain as the defaults selected by the remind developer. IOW, the tk dependency has been specified upstream, and not by Arch.

Your bug report may still be actioned, but bear that in mind.

gammel.holte

Member

Registered: 2010-02-01

Posts: 53

Re: Problem with remind calendar utility

AFAIK remind allows both building with & without Tcl/Tk out of the box. From its README:

Quick UNIX installation instructions for the very impatient:

If you have Tcl/Tk (wish 4.1 or higher) installed and are running X Windows:
--------------------------------------------------------------

1) Type: wish ./build.tk from this directory.  Fill in the various
   options and hit "Build Remind"

2) Type: "make install" -- you may need to be root to do this.

If you do NOT have Tcl/Tk or are NOT running X Windows:
-------------------------------------------------------

1) Edit the file "src/custom.h" according to your preferences.

2) Edit the file "src/lang.h" to choose a language.

3) Type: "./configure"  (You can supply options; type "./configure --help"
   for details.)

4) Type: "make"

5) Type: "make install" -- you may need to be root to do this.

movarian

Member

Registered: 2010-06-09

Posts: 1

Re: Problem with remind calendar utility

Hi,

I always pipe the output of remind -c through the following trivial perl script, which seems to correct the flaw mentioned under 1 (note that it assumes that no reminder MSG contains a pipe |):

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Encode qw(from_to);
while (<>) {
    my @joined;
    if (/\|/) {
        my @fields=split /\|/, $_;
        my $last=pop(@fields);
        foreach my $elem (@fields) {
            my $bytelength=length($elem);
            from_to($elem, 'utf8', 'latin1');
            my $characterlength=length($elem);
            from_to($elem, 'latin1', 'utf8');
            my $difference=$bytelength-$characterlength;
            $elem.=" "x$difference;
            push(@joined,$elem);
        }
        my $joined=(join "|", @joined) . "|".$last;
        print $joined;
    }
    else {
        print;
    }
}

Maybe anyone else finds this useful.

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