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

[Hideki Yamane]

On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 09:42:36 +0000
Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> 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?

 anthy vs mozc : mozc is better to default now

 - As a user, I prefer mozc than anthy. When I used anthy on Debian long
   ago, its hiragana-kanji conversion quality did not satisfy me, lower
   than IM on Windows. However, mozc is good - almost same quality as Google
   Japanese Input Method on Windows since its code base is same one.

 - Upsteam: anthy development is not active, almost dead since years.
   Original author says "This is unmaintained ancient stuff and not for
   general use." in his repo [1] and now I found some other staff tries to
   restart it as anthy-unicode [2]
 
   While mozc is still alive [3]. mozc did not accept patches from outside
   of Google in early days, but it seems that they relax their policies [4].

 
 1) https://github.com/yt76/anthy/blob/master/README
 2) https://github.com/fujiwarat/anthy-unicode
 3) https://github.com/google/mozc/commits/master
 4) https://github.com/google/mozc/blob/master/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md



> 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.

 Well, it's better to be on every archs, but we can ignore them since
 nearly 100% Japanese desktop users use it on i386, amd64 and arm[hf|64].


> I'm also concerned that mozc still depends on GTK 2 (a switch to GTK
> 3 was tried and then reverted, see #967641). This is OK for bookworm,
> but will probably not be supportable in Debian 13.

 It should be reported to mozc upstream, they don't aware of it now, I guess.


> > Upstream prefers ibus-anthy for Japanese input
> 
> Please talk to upstream about this: if mozc is a better default for Debian,
> then it's probably also a better default for upstream.

 Okay, I'll do.



-- 
Regards,

 Hideki Yamane     henrich @ debian.org/iijmio-mail.jp