Hey,
I've been looking at the new ibus/g-s-d/g-c-c stack recently to update
in raring and I'm not convinced it's a good idea to update to those. We
have discussed the issue a bit on IRC today but I figured I would write
an email to the list to document and share the thinking.
There seem to be several annoying issues with the new ibus/GNOME
keyboard stack.
The most annoying one is the drop of the "Separate layout per window"
feature. That feature might come back at some point but it's not in
GNOME 3.6 and still is on "need for design" upstream so we shouldn't
hold on it for this cycle.
The new ibus is having the same issue...
Some pointers on discussion around those topics:
* https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684210 - "'Separate layout
per window' is missing"
upstream discussion on the feature being dropped
* http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=692424 -
the bug is about some ubuntu ibus packaging fixes but it turned into a
discussion between the ibus maintainers about the new ibus version, they
don't consider it ready for end users
* https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2012-October/004014.html
One discussion on the ibus topic we had early on this list
Note that no major distribution has been released yet with that new
stack (Debian has it in experimental only and the Debian ibus maintainer
seem to have issues with the new version, the OpenSuse maintainer seem
to have concern about it as well and it's not decided if they will ship
it for their next version due in march, fedora 18 will have it but it
has been delayed to january) which means the new stack didn't get much
of "real world feedback" yet, I don't think we should be in the first
one to push it.
Based on that it seems a safer bet to stay on the current ibus until we
know better were things are going.
Our options, if we stay on the current ibus, are:
- stay on g-s-d/g-c-c 3.4 (the current version)
- update g-s-d/g-c-c to 3.6 fully using the upstream code without
building with ibus (they have a fallback mode without ibus integration),
that's not going to restore the 'Separate layout per window' option but
would avoid the ibus issues at least. We will need to update our
keyboard indicator still if doing that
- update g-s-d/g-c-c to 3.6 and revert the keyboard changes (e.g go back
to the 3.4 codebase for the region panel and the g-s-d keyboard
handling). If we do that we avoid the need to get the keyboard indicator
this cycle
There are good reasons to not keep delaying the g-s-d/g-c-c updates so I
would try to avoid 1 and would suggest to start with 2 and see what
issues we get from it and what we can build from there. We can then
consider doing the extra work to add the missing bits then or go for 3
and revert the 3.6 keyboard change.
Note that option 2 and 3 might have an impact on the "replace
language-selector by the region capplet" work, especially if we go back
to the 3.4 codebase on that panel, we might want to postpone that work
for yet another cycle in that case...
That's my thinking on the topic ... comments are welcome as usual ;-)
Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher
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