Bug#1072491: Dead keys stopped working in unspecified environment

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle -1 Dead keys stopped working in unspecified environment
Control: reassign -1 general

On Sun, 02 Jun 2024 at 21:58:32 +0200, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
> Exactly some bug as https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1070745
> appears once again.

#1070745 was a very specific regression in libglib2.0-0t64 which affected
ibus, and it is unlikely to have come back; and it had nothing to do with
gnome-session-bin.

I think that what you are encountering is more likely to be some different
issue that affects either ibus or another component that is related to
"dead keys", causing the same symptom as #1070745 (dead keys not working)
but for a different reason.

Please start from the beginning:

- What desktop environment or other user interface are you using?
  You didn't say, but presumably the answer is not GNOME, because if it
  was, then gnome-session-bin could not have been removed.

- Are you using a display manager?
    - If yes, which one? (gdm, lightdm, xdm, sddm, ...)
    - If no, how do you get from a rebooted computer into the session
      where you expected dead keys to work?

- What keyboard layout and other locale settings are you using?

- How can a developer reproduce the problem that you are seeing?

On Thu, 06 Jun 2024 at 17:02:15 +0200, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
> Found the reason to dead keys stopped working, but why it happened I
> have no idea.
> 
> Reason: Either the package gnome-session-bin was uninstalled or
> gnome-session-bin is now a requirement for working dead keys?
> 
> I have not myself uninstalled gnome-session-bin!

Do you mean that this happened?

- in late May 2024, you had keyboard settings where "dead keys" worked
  as intended;

- something that was not a deliberate action by you (perhaps "apt autoremove"
  or equivalent) removed gnome-session-bin in early June;

- after gnome-session-bin was removed, "dead keys" didn't work;

- you reinstalled gnome-session-bin and its dependencies;

- after doing that, "dead keys" work again?

Or if you mean something different, please describe it with a similar level
of detail.

The lists of packages installed and removed in /var/lib/apt/history.log
are likely to be useful information.

If this problem is related to packages that were installed and removed,
and you are using a non-GNOME environment, then I think it's more likely
to be related to some other package that gnome-session-bin depends on,
rather than gnome-session-bin itself - possibly dbus-user-session,
dconf-gsettings-backend or xwayland.

    smcv