[Pkg-ime-devel] The upstream devlopment of SCIM packages

[Ming Hua]

Hi everyone,

I am writing this mail trying to summarize the SCIM upstream
development.  I'll present my opinions about what changes should be made
to Debian packages, and of course, asking for others' advices.

The main part, scim, is entering beta for the new 1.1.x development
branch (which will released as 1.2.0 eventually).  I haven't looked at
the packages yet, but it seems they are not binary compatible with 1.0.x
series.  James Su has released the new scim-chinese (renamed as
scim-pinyin, see below) and scim-tables for 1.1.x series, but I'm not
sure about scim-hangul, scim-uim and scim-m17n status.

The impact on Debian:  James is planning to drop scim-config-gconf from
scim, since nobody is using it.  This means we are going to drop the
Debian packages as well.  I am also planning to merge the three socket
related Debian packages (scim-frontent-socket, scim-server-socket and
scim-config-socket) to one package, but I am not sure if I should do
this in 1.0.x series (so to push it into sarge) or not.

The imengine plugin for scim-tables will be separated from scim and put
into scim-tables package.  This means we can't have a arch:all package
for scim-tables anymore.  Most likely I am going to add a arch:any
scim-imengine-table package to the scim-tables source package.

There are also messages from Hong Kong developers about adding tables
into scim-tables-zh package.  The are in scim-tables 0.5.x (for scim
1.1.x and 1.2.x), but James has said he won't backport them to 0.4.x
(for scim 1.0.x and what Debian packages) himself.  We are most likely
going to end up backporting them ourselves, it should not be too hard,
though.

The scim-chinese package is renamed as scim-pinyin, because that's what
it is and always has been.  My plan is a new source package with proper
Replace: and Conflict: set.

That's all I know about the changes going to happen with scim 1.2.0.  I
am currently working on scim 1.0.x packages to make sure they have a
good shape in sarge, and can be smoothly upgraded later.  If I still
have time after that, I am planning to package scim 1.1.x packages to
experimental.

Any comments, suggestions?

Thanks,
Ming
2005.01.22