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

[Jeremy Bicha]

On 20 November 2012 13:13, 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.
>
> 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 ;-)

Hey could we revisit this topic and see what still is blocking ibus
1.5 from Ubuntu?

The 'separate input sources per window' feature has apparently
returned which was a big blocker last year.[1]

I believe the other big blocker was creating an indicator for
ibus-1.5. I don't think anything has been done on that yet since the
Desktop Team doesn't really use ibus themselves which makes it harder
to ensure that it's working correctly. I believe we need some kind of
indicator-keyboard anyway to avoid needing to keep the keyboard plugin
in gnome-settings-daemon at 3.6 indefinitely. There's a basic mockup
on the wiki[2].

Was there anything else serious enough to still block ibus 1.5?

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2013/01/14/input-sources-in-gnome-3-7-4-continued/
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LanguageAndText#Switching_between_keyboard_layouts_and_other_input_sources

Thanks,
Jeremy