[Pkg-ime-devel] Bug#692424: Bug#692424: ibus: Merge fixes from Ubuntu

[Aron Xu]

On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 10:58 AM, Jeremy Bicha <jbicha at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On 10 November 2012 21:20, Aron Xu <happyaron.xu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> GNOME 3.6 can live with older version of ibus if you don't enable the
>> compile time integration, and currently the integration makes input
>> experience gets downgraded heavily, it's highly recommended not to enable it
>> at least for this cycle.
>
> But then users won't have any integration at all. That means users
> won't have the keyboard indicator which affects far more people than
> just ibus users and it can make log in quite a bit more difficult.
>

Integration isn't always a good thing, and it is good only when people
have done it correctly. Ubuntu has not used the whole stack of GNOME
for several cycles, and it shouldn't be an excuses that GNOME got the
keyboard indicator work so the experience of input method users can be
forgotten.

>> Reasons behind are the integration hides most input method engines in ibus
>> that GNOME developers think useless, they believe that only a small number
>> of high quality engines will be able to handle all the users' needs, while
>> most of them have never tried a input method, not mentioning how users
>> depend on the existence of many many different engines that they never heard
>> about.
>>
>> Another reason is when you have the integration enabled and ibus-daemon
>> available, any other input method framework will not work because
>> gnome-settings-daemon will continusly reset the input method related
>> variables and try to start ibus. In this case nether the alternative input
>> method framework nor ibus can behave normally.
>
> I don't know much about ibus as I don't use it. I'm just working on
> the ibus transition because it is now intertwined with GNOME
> 3.6...which has already been released with Ubuntu 12.10 last month.
>

I know, I'm suggesting not to use a pre-release version of ibus as
Ubuntu has suffered lots of troubles by shipping versions of such
kind, especially you'll have to invest more manpower to pick upstream
fixes and make SRUs from time to time, even some of the difficult ones
are left there because it's not possible to get them fixed through
SRU.

> As far as I've seen, there hasn't really been any discussion about the
> GNOME ibus integration since your thread in July. Distros are already
> shipping GNOME 3.6. Now that 3.7 is just starting, it may be a good
> time to discuss improving the input method feature. Integration with
> other input method frameworks likely won't be considered but there
> should be a way to bypass the integration for users or distros who
> need something else.
>

I'm not going to argue at desktop-devel list anymore, it's kind of
wasting my time to talk with people who never used an input method but
pretend to know everything about input methods.

> As far as Ubuntu is concerned, I believe ibus is the only "supported"
> input method, but we should probably be having this conversation in a
> more public place among people that are more knowledge and affected by
> this than I am.
>

No, you are not correct by saying ibus is the only one "supported by
Ubuntu", actually it needs to be changed to "supported by Canonical".
This does not imply others aren't supported, even not by the
community. Or you are telling me most part of Ubuntu is just hell, I
don't believe this is what you mean.

> The list of ibus engines looks pretty extensive in
> http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-control-center/tree/panels/region/gnome-region-panel-input.c#n67
> but if anything is missing, it looks easy to patch it in.
>

Right, but you may not want to add all available engines to the list,
or there design is totally non-sense. But in deed, all the engines are
useful to someone, and they need to be enlisted in some way, not this
way IMHO. There is already a must for some users to run gsettings
command to expose all the engines, but that's not desired for good UX.

>> Although I don't recommend to use a pre-release version, patches are
>> welcomed to help us make everything better.
>
> Ubuntu already postponed that transition one cycle and there simply
> isn't enough reason to keep putting it off.
>
> Jeremy

I don't think there's enough reason to not putting it off.

--
Regards,
Aron Xu