Hannes,

> 3.8gamma 6475 ?!?
> Trying out various Unicode things doesn't work. Often emergency evaluators
> pop up.

  The emergency evaluator shouldn't pop up, yes.  Showing ?'s is the
intended behavior.

> A code snippet like
> 
> s _ FileDirectory default readOnlyFileNamed: 'utf8test.txt'.
> s  converter: UTF8TextConverter new.
> s contents.
> 
> doesn't  seem to work.

  Can you send me the utf8test.txt file?

> It is difficult to check as well as the default
> font does not show simple Unicode chars like Greek letters.

  I thought having font only doesn't make too much sense, but I might
be wrong.

> MultistringCharacters show up with their internal encoding as value (like
> 1069548123).

  I'm not sure what are MultistringCharacters, but if it means that
you inspect a MultiString and select one of slots, showing the value
is the expected behavior.  Strings do that.

> The whole thing doesn't look like it is gamma...
> (perhaps ceteribus paribus disregarding the Unicode enhancements, but that
> was probably not the original intention)

  I'm sorry, as you're one of the early supporters.  I admit that I
couldn't spend enough time after it got into the main update stream,
but reverting it isn't an option I think.

  At least, the Japanese stuff works if you load one "japanese package
(sar)".  A little support code for other languages should make it
work for the language.

  Also, the Latin-1 part works ok.  It doesn't make too much sense to
revert the change.

> Is the 3.8 image intended to be useful as is (and if so how) or is the
> idea that people should just switch to 3.9 anyhow?

  It is somewhat useful pretty as it is for certain languages.

  You have to be aware that "supporting Unicode" is very different
concept from "supporting language X".  Supporting a language doesn't
come for free.  In any system, not only in the m17n Squeak, this is
the case and many people are spending time to build the upper layer on
the top of the foundation.

  The last few months were kind of crazy for me, but I should get back
to more calm, normal life in coming months and want to look at the
issues.

  Thank you for the feedback (really!)

-- Yoshiki