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

[Ma Xiaojun]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 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.

What was the IRC channel?

> 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

Exactly.
I probably want to try adding such feature back to IBus itself at certain point.
But I have no confidence of persuading so-called GNOME design people,
please help.

> * 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

Be aware of the fact that Aron Xu and Jeremy Bicha don't use IBus.
Sir Ubuntu, there is no free lunch.
If you have specific design idea/blueprint that related to IBus,
please use upstream channel to request or discuss.

> 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.

Release of other distributions may not change anything. Fedora 17
comes with IBus 1.4.99 and users complain about global state issue.
But we haven't found a workaround yet.

> 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...

The best thing I would like to see is that we patch 3.6 g-c-c to have
local layout state and try to push back to upstream.
The IBus indicator is a shame of Ubuntu, it is an ugly patch which
contains no author information.
Do you have a blueprint for new IBus indicator?
Do you have a code repo for new IBus indicator?