[Pkg-ime-devel] Bug#645729: Bug#645729: Bug#645729: checking for ibus support in gtk2 and gtk3 separately

[Osamu Aoki]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 09:52:56PM +0800, Aron Xu wrote:
> We tried to workaround it in Fcitx by recommending GTK2 IM Module in
> the GTK3 package, and do the inverse in the GTK2 package. In this
> case, users are very probably getting both IM Modules installed at the
> same time, so they can avoid weird misbehavior of installing only one
> of the two.

Is having dependency loop OK for recommend?  I think this is bad idea.
See "the circular dependency loop" in recent policy:

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html
If there is a circular dependency among packages being installed or
removed, installation or removal order honoring the dependency order is
impossible, requiring the dependency loop be broken at some point and
the dependency requirements violated for at least one package. Packages
involved in circular dependencies may not be able to rely on their
dependencies being configured before they themselves are configured,
depending on which side of the break of the circular dependency loop
they happen to be on. If one of the packages in the loop has no postinst
script, then the cycle will be broken at that package; this ensures that
all postinst scripts are run with their dependencies properly configured
if this is possible. Otherwise the breaking point is arbitrary. Packages
should therefore avoid circular dependencies where possible,
particularly if they have postinst scripts.


> To answer your question ultimately, we need to have two things fixed in GTK3:
> 1.Add a GTK3_IM_MODULE variable.

This needs buy-in from upstream.  Do they support it?  Does it works
older packages with few updated packages or do we need to recompile many
packages?

> 2.Better fallback handling when GTK_IM_MODULE is set but the the
> specified IM Module does not work or isn't present. It is expected to
> fallback to XIM when this happens, but currently the fallback does not
> work at all.

True.