Multilingual and Asian input methods

On Fri, Oct 21, 2005 at 06:51:08PM +0200, David Oftedal wrote:
> Hello!

Hi David!

> I've noticed that there's been some discussion on this list about what 
> multilingual input method to standardize on in future releases of 
> Ubuntu. Unfortunately, as it is now, none of the well-known ones are 
> working in Breezy.

Thanks for bringing this up.  I have been think of sending a mail here
talking about input method packages in ubuntu, so that many developers
(who don't use input methods themselves) can see the situation and
provide advices and help.  It's great to see that you are also
interested in this, and beat me on sending the mail.

> SCIM, which is probably the most user-friendly alternative,

As I am the maintainer of quite some SCIM packages (scim, scim-pinyin,
scim-tables and scim-uim), I'll only talk about SCIM here.  (I'll
probably send another mail about the input methods for Chinese later, if
I have time.)

> has a bug which makes it segfault.

If there is a report in bugzilla or malone, I would be very happy to see
it.  Because those versions are shipped in sarge (and is what is in
testing now), and they have been rock solid for me (I use Debian testing
for my workstation).

> Breezy uses a pretty old version, so this might have been fixed in a
> newer release.

I've been working on bringing up-to-date SCIM packages into Debian since
sarge is released.  I've just sent an update to SCIM upstream mailing
list, the packages in sid now are in a reasonable shape.  There are
still three packages need more work, and I'm on it.

Obviously I can't be impartial on this issue, but I see SCIM as a good
candidate to be the default input method for Ubuntu.  SCIM is indeed
hard to set up compared with some other input methods, but as Adam
Conrad said, I've had some short discussion with him on IRC, and we
would like to put efforts in it so that it can work out of box for end
users (and easy for them to configure).  Of course, ideas and help are
much appreciated.

Many people have said good words about SCIM, I just want to emphasize a
big advantage about SCIM: it has probably the best coverage of the input
method needs.  It has good support for two of the main input methods in
mainland China (Wubi and Pinyin), one of the main input methods in
Taiwan and Hong Kong (Chewing), four Japanese input methods (anthy,
canna, prime and skk), one Korean input method (hangul), and last but
definitely not least, dozens of other languages through scim-tables and
scim-m17n.  Even if one language is not supported, it won't be too hard
to write a table-based input method for it with scim-tables or
scim-m17n.  There are some traditional Chinese (a.k.a. zh_TW) input
methods missing, and maybe some Korean ones, but it's coverage is pretty
good.

That's for languages.  SCIM also provide both GTK+ based program (scim)
and Qt/KDE based program (skim), which may be great interest to Kubuntu
people.

Of course, not all these packages are packaged in Debian (skim and
scim-fcitx are missing), but if there are enough interests and man
power, we can work on them.  There are already unofficial packages
floating around.

So the main question is:  Does Ubuntu developers see _one_ main input
method good?  (I assume they already agree providing input methods is
good.)  From the Ubuntu/Kubuntu situation, it seems we are not about
giving user choices (as in Debian), but about giving user one thing that
works well.  If that's the philosophy, I would really be glad to work
with other people to bring a good set of SCIM packages into dapper and
have it work as well as possible, and for as many people as possible.

Thanks for reading, and also thanks for this great distribution.

Ming
2005.10.21