Update on the new ibus-1.5 and gnome-settings-daemon gnome-control-center 3.6 situation

[Sebastien Bacher]

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