SCIM in Dapper

On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 11:24:14PM +0200, David Oftedal wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> I finally gave up on Breezy and upgraded to Dapper in order to get my 
> favorite Asian input methods (SCIM) working properly. They are, sort of, 
> and nothing's caught on fire yet, but there are a few problems:

Dapper is still in the very early stage of development, so it's very
likely things don't quite work yet.  As I've said, I'll keep eyes on
SCIM support for dapper, but I won't do any ubuntu-specific work at this
time, my effort now is on getting debian packages in good shape.

Of course, if you are willing to test SCIM packages in dapper from time
to time, it will be nice, and I'll try to answer your questions.

> scim-setup, or the package which seems to contain it, can't be installed.

/usr/bin/scim-setup is in package scim, I don't see any reason it can't
be installed.

> scim-hangul isn't showing up in the list.

scim-hangul needs to be rebuilt against SCIM 1.4 ABI, see debian bug
#336270 [1].

> scim-chewing isn't showing up in the list.

scim-chewing 0.2.1-1 is needed (also for 1.4 ABI), but it fails to build
on all arches in ubuntu [2].  It did build in Debian, but also fails to
build in sid now.  The error is:

configure.ac:33: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_LIB_LTDL
      If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
      See the Autoconf documentation.
make: *** [configure] Error 1

Seems to be something related to libltdl3-dev dependency, need to file a
bug in debian.

> scim-m17n isn't workig. (According to David Mandelberg)

Same as scim-hangul, see debian bug #335957 [3].

> And finally, scim-tables-anything (zh, ja, ko, additional) can't be 
> installed.

Also need to be rebuilt against SCIM 1.4 ABI, but there are other things
involved, see debian bug #327315 [4].

1. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=336270
2. http://people.ubuntu.com/~lamont/buildLogs/s/scim-chewing/0.2.1-1/
3. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=335957
4. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=327315

> This seems to be largely due to several modules being left from the old, 
> non-functional version. There's also a slight delay when one attempts to 
> start a GTK+ 2 app without having any others open already, and I think 
> it might be because this makes GTK+ 2 attempt to start SCIM.

As noted in /usr/share/doc/scim/README.Debian.gz, run "scim -d" in your
X initialization script, or run it manually in an X terminal.  Otherwise
GTK2 apps will automatically stop scim when no other apps have a
editable area, and the next app will start scim again when it launches,
which causes significant delay.

> I hate to keep on ranting about this, but since the problems with SCIM 
> weren't fixed in time for the Breezy release, is there any chance that 
> someone might fix them in time for Dapper? I really doubt that anyone's 
> going to come up with a better all-round solution than SCIM, before 
> April, and UIM, which seems to be the main contender, seems to be less 
> affected by pure packaging problems than SCIM.

So except the scim-chewing issue, everything is known and recorded in
debian BTS (I have no idea why you are having problem with scim-setup
though).  Given the time ahead for dapper, I believe we can do a
better job than breezy.

Thanks for testing and reporting.

Ming
2005.10.30