Bug#1115532: libgtk-4-1: compose and dead keys not working anymore on wayland

[Jeremy Bícha]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 2:40 AM Frederic Peters <fpeters at debian.org> wrote:
> I went digging and I found the discussion in
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/7581
>
> | On Wayland, this is entirely the responsibility of the compositor:
> | we no longer do any compose handling on the client side.
>
> with a link to
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/commit/621b7facc8b098811f659a0cba56d27e6ae39ea2
>
> and ultimately I read the NEWS file and the note for 4.19.2:
>
>    Note: This release makes GTK rely on the Wayland text protocol
>    for input method support. For compositors without that protocol,
>    you can manually set GTK_IM_MODULE=simple to get back support for
>    X11-style compose sequences and dead keys.
>
> and that's it, installing ibus fixed that for me.
>
> ibus is already a Recommends: on gnome-shell, I don't know how GTK
> applications would behave on other compositors, and if it would make
> sense to add a recommends to gtk4 itself, I'll leave you as the judge
> for that.

Simon, do you have any thoughts on what we should do here?

I have added Depends: ibus to gnome-core today. Maybe I should add
Depends: ibus-gtk4 there too.
gnome-shell has Recommends: ibus
ibus has Recommends: gtk4

libgtk-4-1 doesn't have any dependency relationship on ibus.
Historically, we would have hesitated to have libgtk-4-1 depend on
ibus-gtk4 because of concerns about circular dependencies. (I'm not
very sure what the problem with circular dependencies is; maybe it's
mostly a problem for bootstrapping?). The workaround has been to use
Recommends instead of Depends.

Related to our multi-year drive to not install gtk2 by default or in
more places than necessary, ibus-gtk4 has a dh_shlibdeps override to
avoid a direct dependency on libgtk-4-1. That may not have been
necessary for gtk4 and maybe we're far enough along that ibus' gtk2
support could be removed now.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha