Bug#694301: gnome-settings-daemon: ibus integration makes ibus useless

[Aron Xu]

Package: gnome-settings-daemon
Version: 3.6.1-1
Severity: grave

IBus integration in GNOME >= 3.6.0 is filtering input method engines
and properties, which makes most of the commonly used engines being
filtered out, or being completely broken because their configuration
menu items ("properties") are almost all being filtered out. Although
engines that are not in its white list can be exposed in
gnome-control-center by manually change a gsettings value, those
engines cannot be used because the existence of white list filtering.

The items in white list are selected by GNOME developers that they
think are most sophisticated based on their opinion that inputting
using IME is just as easy as input Spanish using an US keyboard which
only needs one or very few options, but the actual situation is in the
contrary. It's a very complicated thing just like there are different
editors including vim, emacs, gedit and even more, and those editors
can't be limited by a DE. Maintaining a patch to that white list to
enable commonly used engines and properties is not feasible for a
downstream project, at least pkg-ime does not have any plan to support
such a move, so the best option is to drop IBus integration in GNOME
by configuring gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-control-center with
--disable-ibus, which preserves the original behavior.

There has been lots of complains in GNOME's desktop-devel-list from
Chinese users and developers, and there isn't real progress on
figuring such collision out right away. Currently Ubuntu has decided
to go with --disable-ibus for Raring with GNOME 3.6, and OpenSuSE does
not have the plan to support such a feature in foreseeable time. Only
Fedora has been officially being the test ground of GNOME so they have
the integration. I see no reason to enable it in Debian, as we are not
yet another test ground.





--
Regards,
Aron Xu