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

[Robert Ancell]

On 21/11/12 07:13, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> 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
>
>
I think option 3 is our best bet if it's feasible to revert the ibus
changes easily. This way we can solve all the other merging issues
immediately and then move to 2 if we can get it working in time for
release (my guess is this wont happen).

--Robert