GNOME and input method integration [LWN.net]

GNOME and input method integration

Posted Jun 27, 2012 12:38 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: GNOME and input method integration by emk
Parent article: GNOME and input method integration

> XXX, sadly, is all about a positive experience for hypothetical future users. But in the real world, all the non-technical XXXX users I know live in mortal terror of the next upgrade, because it's either going to break their laptop beyond repair, or force them to completely relearn YYYY.

Yet another summary of the Linux Desktop experience!

> I don't know how to solve this.

Commercial software is reasonably good at solving this problem (and less at others). It works like this: paying customers threaten to slay a few salesmen in case of any regression. Scared salesmen threaten to slay developers in case of any regression. Managers staff validation teams to keep everything under some level of control.

This obviously does not work when developers are left alone/in charge. When developers are in charge you get a grand revolutionary design every year or two. Which never gets completed before the next one.

Sorry this is getting a bit off-topic.

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GNOME and input method integration

Posted Jun 27, 2012 14:00 UTC (Wed) by emk (guest, #1128) [Link]

OK, I just took a look at iBus, and here's what I've found. Note that I'm running Ubuntu 11.04, because that's what shipped on my laptop last November and I haven't upgraded yet. Why haven't I upgraded? The usual reasons:

I wasn't crazy enough to try the first version of Unity.
Now that Unity is semi-mature, I've been too busy with paying projects to risk massive breakage.
I have no idea how much of my laptop's hardware will stop working if I upgrade, even though I paid extra for a high-quality Ubuntu preload from an award-winning vendor.

So, how about iBus?

The UI actually looks halfway decent. I could like this.
The keystrokes used for controlling pre-edit are completely different from what I expect. A sequence like "c," automatically commits the "c" instead of waiting for "ç". It looks like I need to type "c1" to get "ç", which is just ridiculous, and would make phonetic input of hieroglyphs unbearable. There's presumably something I'm missing here.
It looks like I get IPA, hieroglyphics, etc., working by generating big plain-text tables, which isn't too awful. But then again, these are easy scripts.
It's completely broken for Java apps. I have no KDE or X11 apps lying around, so I can't test those. There's a ibus-kde plugin which hasn't had any commits in two years.
It breaks Emacs hard, including the XCompose sequences that I use to type French—even if I override the relevant environment variables to tell it to leave Emacs alone. Presumably I can load ibus-mode to integrate with Emacs, but I doubt that's going to fix XCompose. Oh happy joy.

Pretty much par for the course, really. Shiny but broken, and Gnome will ship it long before it's actually in a semi-usable state. And I have no idea what will happen with non-Gnome apps.

And this will be an especially bad transition, because users can't actually complain without fighting through an enormous language barrier. Reading through the threads that our editor linked, I see Chinese users and developers pouring their heart out in badly-broken English. Then the Gnome developers like Owen Taylor just steamroller them with beautiful, eloquent native prose. I've been on the other side of that particular dynamic, and it's no fun at all.