Bug#1029821: change gnome-desktop's default choice of Japanese input methods for Debian

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Hi!

I'm commenting on this with my Ubuntu glasses on. :/

On 2023-03-02 10:42, Simon McVittie wrote:
> Is there consensus among Japanese-speaking users of Debian that mozc
> is a better default for all Japanese speakers, including new users
> who are not familiar with GNOME or Debian?
> 
> I want to avoid changing this from anthy to mozc-jp, and then getting
> a second bug report from a different Japanese user saying that we
> need to change it back!

My impression from the Ubuntu side is that there is a consensus. 
ibus-mozc has been preferred over ibus-anthy since Ubuntu 16.04 at the 
request of Japanese Ubuntu users. I can't recall any user request since 
then to change the default Japanese IBus IM.

There is a point of concern, though: mozc upstream seems to be moving 
towards replacing gtk with qt. Since the main Ubuntu ISO does not 
include qt, that may result in an undesired change of Ubuntu's default 
in the end. Not sure if qt would be a problem for Debian.

But even if there is a risk that Debian would need to change again in a 
later release, the current situation is an inconsistency between the 
installer and gnome-initial-setup. So to me it sounds reasonable to make 
the suggested change to mozc-jp in Debian 12. Doing it the other way 
around wouldn't have much user support AFAICT.

> Looking at #984875 and #983653, I also see a mention of mozc only
> being available on certain architectures: it's available on x86, ARM
> and riscv64, but not on mips*el, ppc64el or s390x.

I don't know the reasoning behind that. Not long ago riscv64 was added 
to the list due to <https://bugs.debian.org/992035>, and it proved to 
build on that arch without issues. So possibly mozc can be built on more 
architectures without a hassle, if that is desired.

> I'm also concerned that mozc still depends on GTK 2 (a switch to GTK
> 3 was tried and then reverted, see #967641).

I did that reversal, sorry. But it was for a good reason. The patch is 
still in the source (but disabled), and maybe just needs a bit more work.

-- 
Gunnar