April 16th there was a problematic comps change to F7 that necessitated associated other changes. FC6 and RHEL5 Behavior ====================== - scim packages were installed only if you chose languages that need it during install, or used groupinstall on a language. - If scim is installed, it automatically runs in the desktop of any language. - Enabled-by-default is potentially annoying to non-SCIM users. However, since it is not installed by default, those users did not complain so much. Users who didn't want it were told to uninstall it (which matches Windows and Mac behavior.) - im-chooser provided a way for the user to override the system's setting, to disable SCIM, or choose a different IM software for that user's desktop. Yesterday's Change ================== https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=229742 We attempted to solve this rare groupremove problem by making SCIM install with the base-x group. This means that *ALL* Fedora desktop installations will have SCIM both installed and running. Due to the enabled-by-default behavior, SCIM annoys non-SCIM users who accidentally hit SCIM hotkeys, popping up the language bar or inputting unwanted characters. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=235435 In an attempt to mitigate this enabled-by-default behavior, this change was hastily made without being thoroughly thought through. It disables the SCIM activation hotkey (CTRL-Space) if you login to a new user profile for the first time with a language that doesn't normally need SCIM. Disabling the hotkey by default is problematic: =============================================== - This creates inconsistent behavior between SCIM user profiles created at different times, depending on what locale and version of Fedora was running at the time. (Source of support and debugging confusion.) - This forces certain users to use a confusingly disjoint configuration within SCIM Setup, which is separate from im-chooser. (User confusion) - This still has an unnecessary memory footprint for users who absolutely never need SCIM. Solution ======== Jeremy Katz, the RH Desktop team and I have agreed upon the following. 1) Undo the hack made in Bug #235435. 2) Change SCIM's automatic launching to be locale specific. For example, Asian languages are in a SCIM automatic list, so launch automatically in those languages. Do not launch SCIM automatically in other languages. 3) Modify im-chooser to allow the user to override the automatic SCIM launch behavior. im-chooser should offer something like: * Always Use [SCIM] * Follow the system-wide configuration [SCIM] * Never use input methods "Follow the system-wide configuration [SCIM]" would be the default for all users. The user can then choose to explicitly override, to enable or disable input methods independently of their locale. Can we please implement this before Fedora 7? The SCIM running by default in all desktop languages is unacceptable, and the hack in Bug #235435 confuses the issue, hiding the real problem. We are willing to be flexible during the freeze to fix this.
It would be really good to get at least 1 and 2 resolved for test4. Even better would be to have them fixed for the weekly live CD spin tomorrow afternoon.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2007-April/msg00393.html Recommendations for the design of part #3.
I've actually had more than one Taiwanese user that use the en_US locale complain to me they don't know how to activate the input method system and get English error messages from gcc at the same time. Is there a way to make im-chooser more discoverable? "System" -> "Preference" -> "Personal" -> "Input Method" is really quite deep. If only we could search the desktop menus ..
Sorry Scott. While I can sympathize with your situation because I sometimes use Japanese on en_US, you have to admit that this is a less common case. It is *NOT* overly difficult to enable IM on our desktops on non-Asian languages when compared to other operating systems.
(In reply to comment #4) > Sorry Scott. While I can sympathize with your situation because I sometimes use > Japanese on en_US, you have to admit that this is a less common case. It is > *NOT* overly difficult to enable IM on our desktops on non-Asian languages when > compared to other operating systems. Actually I sympathize strongly with this comment. Being able to just run "yum groupinstall chinese-support" and knowing it run by default is much nicer for users than having to find and fiddle with im-chooser and it works great in FC6 and RHEL5 where scim is not installed by default. So either we should not install scim by default or otherwise yes it seems we need to disable it by default for non-Asian desktops.
(In reply to comment #5) > (In reply to comment #4) > > Sorry Scott. While I can sympathize with your situation because I sometimes use > > Japanese on en_US, you have to admit that this is a less common case. It is > > *NOT* overly difficult to enable IM on our desktops on non-Asian languages when > > compared to other operating systems. > > Actually I sympathize strongly with this comment. Being able to just run > "yum groupinstall chinese-support" and knowing it run by default is much nicer > for users than having to find and fiddle with im-chooser and it works great > in FC6 and RHEL5 where scim is not installed by default. Just because scim is installed, though, doesn't mean that all users on the system are going to use it. In fact, maybe just I do and the rest of my family doesn't. > So either we should not install scim by default or otherwise yes it seems > we need to disable it by default for non-Asian desktops. Not installing it by default really doesn't do anything to fix the problem; it just continues to pretend that it's not there. And it's not really even an option any more with the move towards having the live CD available as one of the things we are doing with the live CD is showing off some of the breadth of our locale support.
> 3) Modify im-chooser to allow the user to override the automatic SCIM > launch behavior. im-chooser should offer something like: > * Always Use [SCIM] > * Follow the system-wide configuration [SCIM] > * Never use input methods > Can we please implement this before Fedora 7? Can you please file another bug for this against im-chooser? (In reply to comment #6) > Not installing it by default really doesn't do anything to fix the problem Agreed. But installing the core scim packages alone doesn't really make sense either if they are not being used. It would be better only to install them when scim IMEngines are installed: so I would prefer a solution which removes the scim cores package from comps completely.
I agree with Scott Tsai in comment 3: im-chooser needs to be more obvious. I'm an en_US user who occasionally writes Japanese, so it vexed me greatly when scim "stopped working" after I re-sync'ed against Rawhide last week. Even more confusingly, launching scim manually (via "scim -d") didn't work, either; the resulting scim didn't pay attention to my hotkeys. The only way I was able to figure out that I needed to run im-chooser was to dig through Bugzilla, which is not something the average user (or even a previous Fedora user who is used to the "scim is always running" behavior) is going to do.
(In reply to comment #3) > I've actually had more than one Taiwanese user that use the en_US locale > complain to me they don't know how to activate the input method system and get > English error messages from gcc at the same time. You could do this by setting LC_CTYPE=zh_TW.UTF-8 in "~/.i18n" say. (Though scim itself follows LANG not LC_CTYPE for it locale dependent defaults.) (In reply to comment #8) > I'm an en_US user who occasionally writes Japanese, so it vexed me greatly when > scim "stopped working" after I re-sync'ed against Rawhide last week. Even more > confusingly, launching scim manually (via "scim -d") didn't work, either; the > resulting scim didn't pay attention to my hotkeys. The old hotkeys should be back now. > The only way I was able to figure out that I needed to run im-chooser was to dig > through Bugzilla, which is not something the average user (or even a previous > Fedora user who is used to the "scim is always running" behavior) is going to do. I know. :( I added a note yesterday to the i18n relnotes FWIW.
*** Bug 240436 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The minimum requirements for F7 were done here, we can close this.
*** Bug 241626 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Just IMHO this is not a problem just for Asian languages -- Compose key doesn't work without some IM running and by default we have no IM method for languages which don't have to have IM.
(In reply to comment #13) > Compose key doesn't work without some IM running Not quite sure what you mean here. Compose should be handled by xkb which does not require IM.
OK, I am really not sure how it should work, but unless I installed scim, Compose key (remapped CapsLock) didn't work for me, Compose--- created just three simple dashes. Then I installed scim and I get my m-dash again.