Bug#941624: Recommending ibus breaks fcitx

[Shengjing Zhu]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 3:26 AM Andreas Henriksson <andreas at fatal.se> wrote:
>
> Hello Shengjing Zhu,
>
> (FYI I've not been part of pkg-gnome maintenance for the better part of
> bullseye development cycle and don't speak for pkg-gnome team, but I
> feel this is not a new issue and hopefully my input can hopefully help
> shed some light on the situation at hand...)
>
> First let me be clear that IBus is *THE* input method supported by
> GNOME. This is not a decision made by or influenced in any way by
> pkg-gnome maintainers. The pkg-gnome maintainers simply makes
> a judgement call on how to best describe the situation in the form
> of package relations.
>
> It is also my previous experience that pkg-gnome team has little to no
> influence over how tasksel describes things (and I doubt anything has
> changed). You might find it that a third party actually has higher
> chance of getting tasksel maintainers to make changes to tasksel if they
> discuss it with tasksel maintainers, rather than trying to go via
> pkg-gnome team.
> My personal best recommendation is to simply not use tasksel!
> (And I wish I could have all the time back that I've wasted on
> supporting confused users who ended up with problems from using tasksel
> over simply using gnome meta-packages. Tasksel simply isn't helpful.)
>
> All the problems you describe to me just sounds like you're describing
> tasksel issues. Some specific comments for things you raised below.
>
> On Mon, Mar 01, 2021 at 11:06:53PM +0800, Shengjing Zhu wrote:
> [...]
> > + Users are now possible to install two input engines. It troubles than benefits.
>
> Bring this up with input engine maintainers. If it's true that having
> more than one installed at any time isn't useful, then the solution is
> that they all provide a common (virtual) package which they all also
> conflict against. Then pulling in one will push out all the others.
>
> This is not related to gnome-shell!
>
> > + And the tasksel won't install corresponding language library for ibus.
> > + And for the im-config, it's not possible to decide which engine is preferred
> >   by the tasksel data.
>
> Please bring up tasksel issues with tasksel maintainers.
>
> This is not related to gnome-shell!
>
> > Yes you can say that users change it by hand, but it's not
> >   what we want to achieve. We want a working desktop for different users by default.
> >
> > If GNOME maintainer want to change the default input method, it's better to
> > do it in tasksel package.
>
> I don't understand why you think tasksel has any influence over what
> GNOME does.... Likely many/most GNOME developers aren't even aware of
> tasksel existance. It's an arcane Debian-only program after all.
>
> >
> > Please downgrade ibus to Suggests for bullseye.
>
> It is my personal general reflection that issues like this exists
> because debian maintainers tries too hard to be accomodating towards
> tweakers which just causes problems and confusion.
>
> As ripping out IBus from under GNOME already requires hacks, I think
> it would simply be a better idea to bump to Depends (and tell tweakers
> to use equivs). That would hopefully make the situtation less confusing
> for people and more obvious that tweakers are on their own with whatever
> hack they come up with. Some info already available at:
> https://wiki.debian.org/InputMethodBuster
>
> Possibly we could also consider adding (versioned?) Conflicts against
> tasksel packages, since there's a long standing disconnect between GNOME
> and tasksel meta-package descriptions. To be able to do versioned
> conflicts tasksel would first need to have a fixed version though, so
> please bring it up with them and then feedback which packages and
> versions are relevant to conflict against.
>
> As of right now, this is something I simply consider "wontfix"
> from gnome-shells point of view. No matter how the package relationship
> is described, the situation that GNOME relies on IBus won't change!
>

FTR, GNOME has the ability to choose ibus. This is not wrong.
However the package relations are more complicated than "Recommends".
This is our(Debian developers) call to deliver a working system.
Now the default installation of Debian for many non-English users have
a broken/incomplete input system, which is a regression from Buster.

-- 
Shengjing Zhu