Re: 3.6 Feature: IBus/XKB integration

[Benjamin Otte <otte gnome org>]

Marguerite Su <i <at> marguerite.su> writes:

> what if after one or two years, a brand-new IM comes.
> 
> then you guys will remove all ibus codes and start what you do today again?
> 
> and after another one or two years, again again.
> 
> then it becomes you guys' life-time career to fix bugs and reinvent the wheels.
> 

Yes, that is exactly what I do.
In fact, I enjoy it a lot to port to a new and better solution and making sure
that solution works really well [1] than trying to be compatible with lots of
different options.

If one chooses a single target, one has a lot of advantages:
- Tight integration is possible.
- One can rely on certain behaviors of that target
- New features can be used immediately
- We have a single point of contact for discussions about the future

Of course, this also requires a lot of things working well between that single
target and GNOME:
- A target that is working well for all use cases
- A willingness from both sides to cooperate
- A working relationship between the involved people

You can find a lot of examples where this works very well [2] and of course I
can also come up with some where it didn't work and we needed to change things
and start over. [3]

So what I think we as the GNOME project want to see happen is that we find a
team that is excited to work with us on improving input methods in GNOME
applications. [4] If that project is called IBus, fcitx, XIM or is something
that is redone from scratch, I don't know. I also don't know if the project of
choice will be ready as-is or will need significant improvements. I also don't
consider myself the person to decide it.

But I am very convinced about two things:
We want a single solution.
And we want you to be happy with it.

Benjamin


1: If you want references, look at the GTK Cairo work I did. And that is now
superseded by Clutter. You can also look at the transition from X11 to Wayland
for an example of that. I'm pretty sure we will make a rather seamless
transition at one point there and not try to support both.
2: Tight coupling of GNOME with X11, NetworkManager, WebKit or Pulseaudio
improved things a lot. At least that's my opinion.
3: The big example of a failed relationship is with Mozilla. It failed once
already (the Epiphany guys with GtkMozEmbed - they started over with WebKit) and
the Javascript situation (gjs is based on Mozilla's SpiderMonkey) isn't very
nice either. Another example that never worked out is spell-checking. Enchant
was never really integrated into GTK and that is why you can't spell-check
normal text entries...
4: As a GTK maintainer, I'm not happy about IM modules as they generally contain
very ugly and often just look plain bad when they try to pop up their own little
X windows in all the wrong places. I'd also be very happy if I could show more
useful information than an underlined pre-edit string.