Globalization Fedora Activity Day 2015 in Tokyo

From Sunday, November 1st to Tuesday, November 3rd, the Globalization Fedora Activity Day event took place in Tokyo, Japan.
Sunday morning, I walked from the hostel near Akebonobashi to the Red Hat office at Ebisu. It was a beautiful autumn day, sunny and warm. At Ebisu station I met Daiki Ueno and he led me to the Red Hat office.
Around 15 people had come to this FAD, from the zanata team, the l10n team and the i18n team. From the community, Tomoyuki Kato who works on Japanese translations and Anish Patil joined. It was a great opportunity to meet colleagues I had never met in person before and only knew from IRC and e-mail. Our colleague Sundeep had not been able to join in person and we tried to to let him take part remotely but this did not work well.
Jens Petersen welcomed us all and opened the meeting. Everybody introduced himself to the others, then we had talks about the current state of globalisation, localisation, and internationalisation by Pravin Satpute, Noriko Mizumoto, Ani Peter, and Akira Tagoh. Then Alex Eng gave a talk about the translation system Zanata. Later we had a video hangout with the Khmer translation team.
We used the remaining time for a hackathon, working together on internationalisation issues.

On Monday morning it was raining heavily and I used the subway and the Yamanote line to get to Ebisu. It is always a pleasure to use the efficient train system in Japan.
We started the second day with a video hangout with Matthew Miller (FPL). Then we continued with the hackathon. I worked with Jens Petersen and Peng Wu on the sub-packaging of the glibc locales. Peng Wu showed me the bootchart project project and we worked together using it to benchmark how much using folders to store the glibc locales slows down the boot process compared to using a locale-archive file. We tested in virtual machines and real hardware, the slowdown seems to be quite small, apparently smaller than random fluctuations.
Because of the Red Hat Forum on Wednesday, Jim Whitehurst was in the Red Hat office in Ebisu today and gave a talk, answered questions and signed copies of his book “The Open Organization”. I was fascinated by the lady translating Jim’s speech into Japanese, it seemed unbelievably fast and accurate to me.
In the evening we had a very nice dinner in an Indian restaurant with the whole team.

Tuesday I discussed with Daiki Ueno how ibus-typing-booster could support Inscript2 which basically means that it must support AltGr keys. Currently ibus-typing-booser uses libtranslit which uses m17n-lib or icu to do the actual transliteration. But libtranslit doesn’t support modifier keys like AltGr and it is debatable whether a transliteration library should do that. Modifier keys don’t have anything to do with transliteration really. But of course they are useful (and sometimes necessary) for input methods. So it seems to be better to use m17n-lib directly from ibus-typing-booster instead of going through the extra layer of using libtranslit. m17n-lib is more an input method library and supports extra stuff in addition to just transliterating, including modifier keys. I wrote a small test program to check how this could be done and discussed it with Daiki Ueno.
In the late afternoon we had summary sessions presenting what people worked on during the hackathon. Finally we did planning for Fedora 24.
Wednesday, most of us went to the Red Hat Forum event.

After the FAD I had a few days of vacation. On Monday, November 9th I went to Yokohama to go to the Enterprise Users Meeting Japan. There were many interesting presentations including one on how Linux is used on the international space station. After this meeting I also had the chance to see an old colleague and friend from SuSE and go for dinner together in Sakuragi-chou.

Meeting all colleagues during the FAD and working together was a very good experience, I hope we will meet again.