Re: Short term GNOME 3 plan for input methods?

[Takao Fujiwara <tfujiwar redhat com>]

Thanks much for your observation.
We'd like to show IBus icon in the top panel for GNOME 3.
If not, I think the usability would be lost for IM users.

On (03/10/2011 09:46 AM), Owen Taylor-san wrote:
> Here's my basic idea of what we might be able to do for GNOME 3:
>
>   * We don't want either the old indicator or the new indicator showing
>     by default for locales like English. It doesn't make sense to have
>     an icon with "No input method/Preferences/About" just sitting there.

In the latest version of IBus GJS for GNOME-Shell, the IBus icon is not 
shown when ibus-daemon is not running, which is handled in 
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/50-xinput.sh .

>   * We should devise some way that we can preconfigure IBus with an
>     appropriate input method for the locale for common locales
>     (zh/hi/ko/ja at the minimum) that do require an input method.
>
>     This may be something that's done more at the distro building
>     level than at the GNOME level, but we need recommendations
>     for the distros of how it should be set up.

The 50-xinput.sh has the list of "as bn gu hi ja kn ko mai ml mr ne or 
pa si ta te th ur vi zh" for the preconfigure.

>   * There should be some way to get IBus configured to run for other
>     locales. This could be a) just something in the release notes
>     that you run from a terminal
>     b) a checkbox in the "Region&  Languages" panel.

Currently im-chooser can set the input method and it's available from 
gnome-control-center.

>   * If we can fix up the immediate issues with the JS indicator in
>     the next few days, we should land it. Otherwise, we should whitelist
>     the old indicator and get it to appear in the top panel. It's
>     frustrating to do that just as we are finally getting rid of the
>     networking icon, but I think it's less weird than having a vital
>     system function in the message tray. (Especially if it shows up
>     as 'main.py'!)

Yes, I think the appearance is not good.

>     There are ~20 translatable strings in the JS indicator, about half of
>     which go away if my suggestion to remove the About dialogs is
>     accepted.

I removed the about dialog as you suggested.
Another idea might be to set gettext domain to IBus.

> So, at this point, you (as a member of the release team) are probably
> saying "WAIT! IBus isn't an approved external dependency, you want to
> add a dependency weeks before the release???" To be clear, all code
> added to gnome-shell would be completely optional. If you don't have
> IBus, you don't get an indicator from what we ship. If a distro has some
> other means to input other languages, then it's free to patch up GNOME
> Shell to make it work as well as possible. (Whitelisting status icons
> to appear in the system status area is a small patch.)
>
> My plan is to continue investigating this over the next few days to see
> if I can figure out a plan for the configuration issue, and see if
> we can fix up some of the immediate issues with the JS indicator to the
> point where I'd be comfortable with it going in as an alternative to the
> old indicator.
>
> I'll report back later in this week about where we are with that.

Great.
fujiwara

> - Owen