https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=834971
--- Comment #2 from Mathieu Bridon bochecha@fedoraproject.org --- (In reply to comment #1)
Hi Matthieu
Mathieu. ;)
I am just surprised noone has reported this issue before...
Let's be honest, there basically aren't any Fedora users in Hong Kong. (whether this fact is because of this IBus issue or because we haven't been good enough at advocacy is not the subject of this bug report).
There's me, but I'm French and can't write Chinese, so I don't really count here.
There seem to be 3 other local Fedora ambassadors, but all my attempts at contacting them basically failed, so they might not be active any more.
The people I have been discussing this issue with are mostly Ubuntu and Debian users though.
Also, it seems to me that the local Linux community (which is very small) is mostly made of geeks/tinkerers, which are very quick to just drop IBus entirely and replace it with something else which is more geared towards the local needs (I think I heard fcitx was more widely praised in wider China).
However, this is becoming an issue with GNOME 3.6 adopting IBus and tightly integrating to it.
I want to advocate GNOME and Fedora in Hong Kong, and my (relatively short, as I've been here for less than two years) experience, as well as discussions I've had with local long time users who can actually type Chinese, indicate that IBus is just unsuitable in Hong Kong at the moment, because of this bug.
Of course, we'd be happy to provide a patch if you agree on the solution and if you can provide some guidance.
That would be helpful if you can.
I am not clear if it is the allowed characters in the tables themselves that need fixing (or does ibus-table ignore those?) or ibus-table itself?
The problem is the filter.
There is currently a filter to let only characters from a given language pass.
With the Candgie and Quick input methods, this filter makes little to no sense, by design of the Candgie and Quick input methods themselves (see my explanation) and so it should just be dropped.
I don't think it is reasonable, especially for those two input methods given their design, to ask the user to select what the filter should let pass. Also consider that the current GNOME design seems to agree with me on this as it doesn't expose those settings anywhere that I could see.
However, there probably are other input methods where this filter makes a lot of sense, so I'm only asking for it to be dropped for Candgie and Quick, not for the whole of ibus/ibus-table.
There obviously are different methods to impleemnt this, the two that come to my mind being:
1. something like: if im_name not in ("candgie", "quick"): do_filter()
2. allow each input method to provide their own set of directives to the framework, so that Candgie and Quick could disable the filter themselves
Which one of these, or any better implementation, is more suitable for upstream is of course left for upstream to decide. :)