Annoying GNOMEism, again (was: Update on the new ibus-1.5 and gnome-settings-daemon gnome-control-center 3.6 situation)

Ma Xiaojun damage3025 at gmail.com
Fri Nov 23 23:49:26 UTC 2012


After GNOME people decided that per windows input source (layout or
input method) is useless.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684210
( The feature existed in 3.4 and before)

They made something even more surprising; white listing input engines
and properties input engines can expose.

Source code hints:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-control-center/tree/panels/region/gnome-region-panel-input.c#n67
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/tree/js/ui/status/keyboard.js#n188

Mailing list hints:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2012-November/msg00091.html
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2012-November/msg00123.html

Bug Tracker hints:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688914
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688916

Disclaimer: I feel strong about this issue so I was kind of rambling,
sorry about that.

The first one does affect us, though a patch would be easy to write.
We have decent packages for every working IBus engines in our
repository (except ibus-libpinyin, it may requires IBus 1.4.99, I'm
not sure). We also have our own way of shipping input methods
packages. Then what? GNOME force downstreams to follow them.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688914#c10

Even if they offered a gsettings key for show_all_sources. It is by
definition non-discoverable. Worse, it will show XKB duplicates,
useless m17n engines, ... That probably make the input source list
unnecessarily much longer.

What if someone come up with a new engine?
1. She'd ask the upstream to update the white list.
GNOME guy claim that it is a one-liner change. Yes it is. But how
would GNOME guys review a engine for languages that they don't
understand? What if the engine author is not well verse in English?
2. She'd ask all the downstream to patch their released versions also?
That must be awful, right?

>From a philosophical point of view, it means that the input space of
GNOME is no longer a open 'market'. Which engines can be used are no
longer determined by users or distributors. It is supervised by G-C-C
developer(s) and thus proprietary.

The second doesn't affect us directly, fortunately, since we need to
re-write a new IBus indicator for AppIndicator anyway.
But the end result is annoying, on Fedora 18 (I install pre-release
version), only ibus-anthy works properly. Other engines are well
handicapped by losing their property menu (context menu).
The philosophical annoyance is the same. It makes an open platform proprietary.

proprietary: one that possesses, owns, or holds exclusive right to something



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