[aur-general] ibus orphans in [community]

[Yichao Yu]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 1:47 PM, Yichao Yu <yyc1992 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Rashif Ray Rahman <schiv at archlinux.org> wrote:
>> On 17 October 2012 00:55, Allen Li <cyberdupo56 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I would like to point out that ibus does Japanese and Korean, whereas
>>> fcitx only does simplified Chinese (at least according to the wiki).
>>> Thus ibus is one of the only input options for those languages on arch
>>> at the moment (barring that other one whose name I'm having trouble
>>> recalling at the moment, which I found inferior to ibus), so dropping it
>>> is extremely unfavorable I think.
>>>
>>> Just my two cents.
>>>
>>> Allen Li
>>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 05:30:30PM +0200, Alexander Rødseth wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ibus is used for keyboard input for a few major non-English languages.
>>>>
>>>> Several of the ibus packages has been unmaintained for a while now:
>>>> https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&repo=Community&q=ibus&maintainer=orphan
>>>> For instance, ibus-sunpinyin, was last updated almost a year ago (2011-10-02).
>>>>
>>>> These ibus-packages have survived at least one package-cleanup, being
>>>> neither adopted nor moved.
>>>> While there is interest amongst the trusted users to maintain these,
>>>> none of the trusted users are currently using ibus.
>>>>
>>>> After visiting #archlinux-cn, a couple of friendly people expressed
>>>> interest in maintaining the ibus packages, but they had only few
>>>> packages on AUR to show for.
>>>> I also learned that mostly, fcitx (currently in [extra], is used
>>>> instead of ibus). Dropping ibus could have been an option, but I also
>>>> heard rumors that ibus will be a dependency of gnome-settings-daemon.
>>>>
>>>> There is also a canidate for asking to maintain the ibus packages,
>>>> that has not yet been contacted, but which already maintains several
>>>> related packages on AUR:
>>>> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?K=yangtsesu&SeB=m
>>>>
>>>> If you think that his packages look ok, my plan is to contact
>>>> yangtsesu and ask if he wants to maintain the ibus packages in
>>>> [community] (and thus becoming a TU).
>>>>
>>>> If you know of other canidates that have a comparable selection of
>>>> relevant AUR packages, please let us know who they are.
>>>>
>>>> Please correct me if any of the above is incorrect or let us know if
>>>> you have additional information.
>>>>
>>>> Sounds like a plan?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Cordially,
>>>>  Alexander Rødseth
>>>>  Arch Linux Trusted User
>>>>  (xyproto on IRC, trontonic on AUR)
>>
>> Also, fcitx looks very CJK-specific to me, whereas ibus is a
>> multilingual input bus (think SCIM). So, not really directly
>> comparable. I'm all for finding someone to maintain the stuff, be it
>> in the repos or AUR.
>
> No, fcitx is also not cjk-specific at all. There is fcitx-keyboard
> (which is already merged into fcitx itself) that you can use keyboard
> layout as input method to input all languages that just need a layout
> switching. It also has spell check/hint(as you can see on the fcitx
> wiki main page..) which ibus cannot provide. Here[1] is also a list of
> input method fcitx support now (basically covers all major input
> method ibus supports). Yes most of them are Chinese input method but
> that's because Chinese input method is the single most complicated
> one..... (also true for ibus).
>
> Yes the original name of fcitx suggest it is a Chinese input method
> but it is not anymore now....
>
> And no, I am not talking about dropping ibus packages (taking into
> account the *stupid* thing gnome3.6 have been doing on input method
> integration, it might not be a good idea to move those into AUR
> either..). Just want to clarify that fcitx is not CJK specific (in
> fact it provides more non-CJK specific features than ibus and scim
> now, e.g. spell, clipboard, lua, xkb, quickphrase etc...) and want to
> encourage people to try fcitx for its handful features even for
> non-CJK ppl.
>
> [1] http://fcitx-im.org/wiki/Distribution_Package_Status
>
>>
>>
>> --
>> GPG/PGP ID: C0711BF1

Just a little bit more noise about fcitx and ibus packages.

Among those fcitx package in AUR, either fcitx-configtool or kcm-fcitx
is already a implicit dependency of fcitx (depending on the DE u r
using) since editing the configure file is no longer supported.
fcitx-sunpinyin and fcitx-cloudpinyin are also installed by most
Chinese fcitx users so it will be really nice to see these package
(along with Japanese and Korean ones) in the official repo (which I am
sure Felix Yan can be a good maintainer).

For ibus packages, it is also not a good idea to drop any of the
existing ibus input methods which is already in the official repo. All
of them are required package if you want to use ibus to input in those
languages. (Since the upstream of most of the packages is not really
active, it shouldn't be hard either.)