Re: Concerning Keyboard Status Menu

[Ma Xiaojun <damage3025 gmail com>]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 10:52 PM, Just Fill Bugs <mozbugbox yahoo com au> wrote:
> Why didn't vi and emacs developers join together and worked on only one true
> editor? Maybe there should not be geany, gedit, sublime and whatever other
> editors.

Nice proof by contradiction.
The thing to proof was: Why single, omnipotent Chinese IME is impossible.

> The so called property list are not exactly property list. Those are
> functionalities provided by the input engine. The input engine developers
> try to come up with clever tricks to speed up user input performance.
> Whether or not the tricks were actually clever enough is not Gnome
> foundations' job to judge.
>
> You are killing innovations over an unsolved problem.
>
> Blocking or selecting authorized "property list" is authorizing whatever
> some innovations the developers have are worthy or not.
>
> Well, I guess that's the trend now-a-day in the Gnome Foundation: We have
> the power to authorize how the developers to innovate. But I'm sorry, "640KB
> was not enough for everyone."
>
> Next time, they will audit feature list in vim and clean up vim for the
> users to nvi and then to classic vi.

Though it may not be related to GNOME Foundation.
I still haven't found the point why I need to explain free 'market'
V.S controlled 'market' and argue that free 'market' works better,
isn't it obvious?

If a project show strong preference of controlled 'market', that'd
make me and probably other FOSS advocates/contributors in China
re-think what's the real point of FOSS adoption.

If FOSS can actually put even more restrictions on development than
so-called locked-down systems (the open IME ecosystem is established
since Windows 95, older versions or other systems at that time not
used). Then what's its real point from a secular point of view?
Especially for whose who (most of the humans) are not in the OS club.

> It's fine to have a default stupid, unusable input method, but limiting on
> the innovation of other input engine authors is just dumb.

Some key points.
Chinese do understand what is third-party IME.
Chinese users cannot care less about consistency. (Many popular
Windows software in China has their own UI toolkits and skin
ecosystems. And Windows built-in IMEs are inconsistent; there are 4
Pinyin flavors for Simplified Chinese and two variants for
Cangjie/Quick/Phonetic for Traditional Chinese in Windows 7. Old
versions similar, I haven't noticed any criticism on this)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not going ethnical. I definitely welcome
anyone managed to finish Chinese Wikipedia GNOME entry one paragraph
exercise to the IME club.

But I was kind offended by the fact some people want to exclusively
power of something they don't use and understand due to some
hypothetical aesthetic reasons; regardless of whether it can be a
serious regression to real users; regardless the ugly nature of the
implementation: solving the problem in wrong place and don't bother to
contact upstream; regardless sharp philosophical conflicts to what we
believe FOSS should be for long.