Hello all.  Michael and Yoshiki have made the m17n changes for 3.8alpha 
available here:

http://impara.de/drop/m17n/

If anyone wants to give them a quick test, install these three files in 
this order in a fresh 3.8alpha image:

m17n37b-2.sar
m17n-2.sar
localeFixes.5.zip

The install takes 10+ minutes from local files, but it seems to 
generally work.

The m17n37b-2.sar file contains a number of font and data files.  Some 
of these are rather large, such as UnicodeData-3.2.0.txt (800K 
uncompressed) and uJapaneseFont.out (3MB uncompressed).  Most are 
stored in the 'fonts' and 'forms' subdirectories which will need to be 
part of the eventual 3.8 distribution, it looks like.  (Hm, could you 
still have a simple working image without these subdirectories if you 
wanted?)

Anyway, I'm trying to figure out how best to add these to the update 
stream.  Right now, the update stream only supports changesets, not 
.sar files or arbitrary font/data files.  There are several possible 
approaches:

1. Convert all of the font/data files to DoIt commands in changesets, 
by turning them into compressed MIME encoded strings or similar.  This 
would be a bit of work (that I don't particularly want to do) and I'm 
not sure if it's even doable for all the files or not.  Also, some of 
the DoIt update files would be pretty large, and would need to be read 
into the image as strings whereas otherwise they could stay outside of 
the image.

2. Force people to download a new 3.8alpha image, don't bother trying 
to support it via the update stream.  It's been a long time since 
people had to this... since 2.0?

3. Put the files in a SqueakMap package, and have an update DoIt which 
loads the package.  This would be pretty simple, although it's a bit of 
a hack, because it would be a very specialized one-time enhancement 
(which would only ever work for 3.8alpha-5976), not really a normal 
package.

4. ?

Right now I'm leaning toward either #2 or #3.

Another issue is that the Japanese font files are much larger than the 
other ones, and it might make sense to leave them out of the update 
stream/standard distribution, as they add several MB.  Perhaps there 
could be a SqueakMap package which contained these and could be a 
simple install. (or there could be some other simple install option)  
The important thing is that all the Smalltalk code changes for m17n are 
built into 3.8, not necessarily the fonts themselves...?

Feedback appreciated.

- Doug