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

[Simon McVittie]

Control: forwarded -1 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-desktop/-/issues/221

On Sat, 04 Mar 2023 at 14:42:06 +0900, Hideki Yamane wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 09:42:36 +
> Simon McVittie  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?
...
> > 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.

I've opened https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-desktop/-/issues/221,
please follow up there with more information.

smcv

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

[Simon McVittie]

On Mon, 06 Mar 2023 at 00:12:38 +0900, YOSHINO Yoshihito wrote:
> Anyway, I have just updated the patch to limit architectures.

I don't think that version would be accepted upstream, because having
a compile-time option per locale for the default input method wouldn't
scale well at all, and GNOME generally prefers having a correct default
rather than a "fix my desktop" option.

Also, I don't think we want to have to update gnome-desktop every time mozc
is changed to compile successfully on an additional architecture.

I'm testing a patch to do this as a runtime rather than compile-time
switch, so that we can use mozc-jp if that's installed, or anthy if not:
if we're doing a Debian-specific patch *anyway*, then that seems more like
what we want.

smcv

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

[YOSHINO Yoshihito]

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 2, 2023 at 10:49 PM Osamu Aoki  wrote:
> Yoshino-san, did you check how mozc maintainers think about your proposal.
>
> If they agree, I think promoting mozc for little endian platform may be good
> idea for better user experience.

I am trying to reach them.

Anyway, I have just updated the patch to limit architectures.

Regards,
-- 
YOSHINO Yoshihito 


use_mozc_jp.debdiff
Description: Binary data

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

[Hideki Yamane]

On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 09:42:36 +
Simon McVittie  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

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

[James Addison]

Package: libgnome-desktop-4-2
Followup-For: Bug #1029821
X-Debbugs-Cc: gunna...@debian.org

On Fri, 3 Mar 2023 15:10:30 +0100, Gunnar wrote:
> On 2023-03-03 13:21, James Addison wrote:
> > I also noticed that some of gnome-desktop's default locale-to-input-source
> > mappings provide multiple entries, delimited by the '+' character:
> > 
> > https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-desktop/-/blob/43.2/libgnome-desktop/default-input-sources.h#L31

> That's a misconception. The '+' character is there to specify a layout 
> variant. So "ch+fr" means the "French (Switzerland)" keyboard layout.

Ok, that's good to have clarified - thank you Gunnar for the correction.

Unrelated to that: I think I'll pause from providing any further comments on
this bug thread for at least a few days.

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

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

On 2023-03-03 13:21, James Addison wrote:

I also noticed that some of gnome-desktop's default locale-to-input-source
mappings provide multiple entries, delimited by the '+' character:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-desktop/-/blob/43.2/libgnome-desktop/default-input-sources.h#L31


That's a misconception. The '+' character is there to specify a layout 
variant. So "ch+fr" means the "French (Switzerland)" keyboard layout.


--
Gunnar

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

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

X-Debbugs-CC: s...@debian.org, z...@debian.org, ken...@xdump.org, 
yy.y.ja...@gmail.com, iwama...@debian.org, debian-i...@lists.debian.org, 
debian-japan...@lists.debian.org, m...@packages.debian.org, 
ibus-an...@packages.debian.org


On 2023-03-03 12:52, James Addison wrote:

If it's true that the cause is that 'tasksel' and 'gnome-initial-setup'
are mismatched, then we could apply a fix in either one.

Given that we have an existing patch available for 'gnome-initial-desktop',
I've opened a corresponding 'tasksel' changeset with the mirrored side of
the fix at:

https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/tasksel/-/merge_requests/25


While either one would address the inconsistency, most Japanese users 
seem to prefer mozc over anthy. So the two routes are not equally good.


Please do not ignore the user preferences.

--
Gunnar Hjalmarsson

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

[James Addison]

Package: libgnome-desktop-4-2
Followup-For: Bug #1029821

I also noticed that some of gnome-desktop's default locale-to-input-source
mappings provide multiple entries, delimited by the '+' character:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-desktop/-/blob/43.2/libgnome-desktop/default-input-sources.h#L31

It's probably a question to ask them, but I am wondering whether it'd be
possible (and/or sensible) to provide *both* anthy and mozc in the default
input sources (which would correspond to adding ibus-anthy and ibus-mozc both
as 'Recommends', instead of a choice between them).

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

[James Addison]

Package: libgnome-desktop-4-2
Followup-For: Bug #1029821

(comment to bug-thread only)

If it's true that the cause is that 'tasksel' and 'gnome-initial-setup'
are mismatched, then we could apply a fix in either one.

Given that we have an existing patch available for 'gnome-initial-desktop',
I've opened a corresponding 'tasksel' changeset with the mirrored side of the
fix at:

https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/tasksel/-/merge_requests/25

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

[James Addison]

Package: libgnome-desktop-4-2
Followup-For: Bug #1029821
X-Debbugs-Cc: s...@debian.org, z...@debian.org, ken...@xdump.org, 
yy.y.ja...@gmail.com, iwama...@debian.org, gunna...@debian.org, 
debian-i...@lists.debian.org, debian-japan...@lists.debian.org, 
m...@packages.debian.org, ibus-an...@packages.debian.org

After attempting a re-install with Japanese language defaults (to try to make
sure that I understand the problem), I'd like to check some more details.

If I'm on the wrong path, then I'll stop adding further comments for a while to
let you all and others find a better solution.

On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 15:50:22 +, Simon wrote:
> When there are patches available for whatever we decide is the right
> behaviour, you shouldn't need to walk through the whole install process.

This is true.  However, these comments seem particularly relevant:

On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 18:39:04 +0800, Shengjing wrote:
> I'm not a Japanese user. But I've been frustrated in the last few days
> of the Bullseye release, when Gnome's upstream choice conflicts with
> Debian's tasksel.

On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 22:07:16 +0900, Kentaro wrote:
> The problem is conflicting with task-japanese-gnome-desktop's recommends.


Based on those, it seems to me that part -- perhaps most -- of the problem is
the 'task-japanese-gnome-desktop' entry[1] for bookworm is currently:

  ibus-mozc | ibus-anthy


So I believe mozc is selected as the first dep-satisfying option during a fresh
Debian bookworm plus GNOME install.  Please correct me if I'm wrong about that.


That conflicts with the default that 'gnome-initial-setup' configures, namely
the 'anthy' input method -- explaining the patch that Yoshino-san provided.


So: regardless of whether we choose 'mozc' or 'anthy', we should try to match
the input method that we install by default with the input method that is
configured by 'gnome-initial-setup'.

(the idea to query the available input engines at selection-time is
theoretically a much more robust approach.. but it could take longer for that
to become available and be tested thoroughly, and as noted previously in the
thread, the default install of GNOME desktop for Japanese language input is
known broken today)


Note: if everyone else understood all that already, and I'm only finally
catching up with you all now, then my apologies for being slow.  It didn't seem
clear to me previously what the core of the problem here is.

[1] - https://sources.debian.org/src/tasksel/3.71/debian/control/#L1462

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

[James Addison]

Package: libgnome-desktop-4-2
Followup-For: Bug #1029821

On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 15:50:22 +, smcv wrote:
> When there are patches available for whatever we decide is the right
> behaviour, you shouldn't need to walk through the whole install process.

Thanks; yep, I think I took an unnecessarily long path through this.  I'd been
looking for a reason to try the latest Debian installer (and may have learned
one or two things about it along the way, but I'll save any of that for
separate threads).

On Wed, 01 Mar 2023 16:47:22 + James Addison  wrote:
>   2. select 'anthy' in 'gnome-initial-setup'
>   3. attempt Japanese keyboard input

Result: ペンギン

>   5. select 'mozc-jp' in 'gnome-initial-setup'
>   6. attempt Japanese keyboard input

Result: ペンギン

(in truth: those are not from the d-i alpha 2 sessions I was running; after
reading Simon's advice, I used a local user account instead)

In both the anthy and mozc cases, the keypresses (chords?) required were fairly
similar: 'pe', 'ng', 'gi', 'ng' - with some delete-key and enter-key usage to
complete each glyph and/or input entry.

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

[Simon McVittie]

On Thu, 02 Mar 2023 at 14:58:36 +, James Addison wrote:
> Thank you; I currently have side-by-side graphical installations of d-i alpha 
> 2
> running in both English and Japanese, to help my menu navigation, and hope to
> confirm keyboard input results within the next day or so.

When there are patches available for whatever we decide is the right
behaviour, you shouldn't need to walk through the whole install process.
It should be enough to:

* install the proposed gnome-initial-setup and/or libgnome-desktop-4-2
* as a privileged (root-equivalent) user, use GNOME Settings or adduser
  to create a new user account
* Log Out or Switch User
* log in as the new user account

You should get the gnome-initial-setup dialog again for the new user,
the first time they log in.

Delete the new user and create another one to continue testing.

If you can't read Japanese, it would probably be helpful to set the
system language to Japanese but set your root-equivalent user's language
to English.

smcv

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

[James Addison]

Package: libgnome-desktop-4-2
Followup-For: Bug #1029821
X-Debbugs-Cc: ken...@xdump.org

On Thu, 02 Mar 2023 22:07:16 +0900 Kentaro Hayashi  wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Mar 2023 16:47:22 + James Addison  wrote:

> > My plan is to:
> > 
> >   1. run the graphical d-i install of a fresh GNOME 43 system
> >   2. select 'anthy' in 'gnome-initial-setup'
> >   3. attempt Japanese keyboard input

> Need to do extra setup.
>
> * sudo apt install -y ibus-anthy
> * ibus restart

Thank you; I currently have side-by-side graphical installations of d-i alpha 2
running in both English and Japanese, to help my menu navigation, and hope to
confirm keyboard input results within the next day or so.

The text that I'll attempt to enter is 'ペンギン', that I believe is a
translation of 'penguin' (according to libretranslate and Google Translate).

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

[Osamu Aoki]

Hi,

This is very convoluted issue.

Disclaimer: I use (n)vim and anthy and voted for non-free-firmware=yes (i.e.,
prioritize user experience)

On Thu, 2023-03-02 at 09:42 +, Simon McVittie wrote:
> Control: tags -1 + moreinfo
> 
> On Sat, 28 Jan 2023 at 16:46:35 +0900, YOSHINO Yoshihito wrote:
> > As mentioned in Bug #984875, gnome-initial-setup's default choice of
> > input method is hardcoded in the dependent libgnome-desktop-4-2 package.
> > The Japanese one is anthy
> > https://sources.debian.org/src/gnome-desktop/43.1-1/libgnome-desktop/default-input-sources.h/#L39
> > preferred by upstream (Fedora/Red Hat) perhaps because its code base is
> > simple and easy to maintain, while this is not suitable for most Debian
> > Japanese users, who use mozc because of its better conversion quality,
> > thus task-japanese-gnome-desktop and task-japanese-desktop has preferred
> > mozc over anthy. So the hardcoded value should be adjusted for our
> > users.
> 
> 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?

Choice of input method engine and its framework are hot topics without easy
unanimous agreements. 

Before going into that kind of discussion, I would like to draw attention to
general performance perception and some technical points.

* Why mozc:
In general, mozc tends to provide better suggestions for the possible choice of
input conversion choices than ones provided by anthy.  This may be the reason
why people like mozc than anthy.

* Why anthy:
In debian/control, mozc source package comes as:
> Architecture: i386 amd64 armel armhf arm64 riscv64
while anthy doesn't have such limitation.  My vague memory tells me that the
code for mozc is written for the little endian system only.  (mozc's C++ header
file structure and shipped data requires specific endianness.)

Also data used for obtaining conversion proposals are more opaque for mozc. 
Data for anthy is more intuitive for modification than that of mozc.  Neither
are easy to do, though.

> I want to avoid changing this from anthy to mozc-jp, and then getting a
> second bug report from a different Japanese user saying that we need to
> change it back!
> 
> 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.

Correct.

> How does this interact with the default being mozc-jp? Do we need to use
> a #ifdef to make the default be mozc on architectures that have it, and
> anthy on architectures that don't?

If we decide to propose mozc as preferred choice, that should be a possible
choice.

> 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.

> > 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.
>
> The only issue reports I could find upstream are
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-desktop/-/issues/181 which is about
> switching the default from kkc to anthy, and
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/issues/104 which is
> older and refers to kkc as being the default.

 * kkc and anthy are both in GPL: kkc was intended to be improved replacement of
anthy by RH developer.  Its resulting performance was not convincing to replace
anthy.  Anthy was by Japanese government sponsored and it's last updates was
gathered and organized by DD (muto-san).

 * mozc is mostly BSD-3-Clause with its opaque learned data being BSD-3-Clause-
with-ICOT-term.  It's by google employee, if I recall.  RH ppl may not like
opaqueness of learned data outside of their easy update.  Learned data is only
provided as a data dump.

> On Wed, 22 Feb 2023 at 15:09:15 +0900, ken...@xdump.org wrote:
> >   Thus with attached patch, gnome-initial-setup will not
> >   show label for mozc-jp as "日本語 (Mozc)" by default.
> 
> What would be the best label to be displayed there?
> 
> What is actually displayed instead?
> 
> >   To display label correctly, fetch_ibus_engines_result must be called 
> >   in advance.
> 
> That's probably not possible: fetch_ibus_engines_result is called
> asynchronously with the result of a D-Bus method call, so it's already
> called as early as possible, and before that point we don't have the
> necessary information.
> 
> Probably the best we can do there is to hard-code a special case for
> mozc-jp.
> 
>     smcv

In order to get mozc to be promoted to be more prominent position, we need to
make sure the maintainer of mozc feels comfortable.  He (Iwamatsu-san) seems to
be making curating many patches and making patch to keep up with gtk3
transition.  Gunnar also seems to be doing QA and regression checks. 

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

[Kentaro Hayashi]

Hi,


On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 09:42:36 + Simon McVittie  wrote:
> Control: tags -1 + moreinfo
> 
snip
> 
> 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?

At least, there is the fact that bullseye's default choice is ibus-mozc 
for Japanese users.

> I want to avoid changing this from anthy to mozc-jp, and then getting a
> second bug report from a different Japanese user saying that we need to
> change it back!
> 
> 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.
> 
> How does this interact with the default being mozc-jp? Do we need to use
> a #ifdef to make the default be mozc on architectures that have it, and
> anthy on architectures that don't?

Surely, it may be better to modify the patch to consider non-available mozc
 on certain architectures. 

> 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.

I didn't noticed that issue. Thank you.

> On Wed, 22 Feb 2023 at 15:09:15 +0900, ken...@xdump.org wrote:
> >   Thus with attached patch, gnome-initial-setup will not
> >   show label for mozc-jp as "日本語 (Mozc)" by default.
> 
> What would be the best label to be displayed there?
> 

IMHO, 日本語 (Mozc).

> What is actually displayed instead?
> 

As I mentioned already, "mozc-jp".

> >   To display label correctly, fetch_ibus_engines_result must be called 
> >   in advance.
> 
> That's probably not possible: fetch_ibus_engines_result is called
> asynchronously with the result of a D-Bus method call, so it's already
> called as early as possible, and before that point we don't have the
> necessary information.

Currently, I agree with you.

Regards,

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

[Kentaro Hayashi]

Hi,

On Wed, 01 Mar 2023 16:47:22 + James Addison  wrote:
> Package: libgnome-desktop-4-2
> Followup-For: Bug #1029821
> X-Debbugs-Cc: yy.y.ja...@gmail.com
> 
> I'd like to contribute by testing d-i with Japanese input (I'm not a Japanese
> speaker, but can offer some time to help).
> 
> My plan is to:
> 
>   1. run the graphical d-i install of a fresh GNOME 43 system
>   2. select 'anthy' in 'gnome-initial-setup'
>   3. attempt Japanese keyboard input

Need to do extra setup.

* sudo apt install -y ibus-anthy
* ibus restart

After restarting ibus, you can switch input source to 「日本語(Anthy)」.
if you change 入力モード(_A), you can type Japanese.

> 
>   4. run the graphical d-i install of a fresh GNOME 43 system
>   5. select 'mozc-jp' in 'gnome-initial-setup'
>   6. attempt Japanese keyboard input

After that, if you change 入力モード(A), you can type Japanese.

> Also:
> 
> My understanding is that the _only_ difference that the patch will make is
> that it will change the default in 'gnome-initial-setup'.  Users could still
> choose 'anthy' -- or another input method -- if they want, for some reason.  
> Is
> that correct?

Yes. users can still choose their preferrable input method.
The problem is conflicting with task-japanese-gnome-desktop's recommends.

Regards,

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

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Hi!

I'm commenting on this with my Ubuntu glasses on. :/

On 2023-03-02 10:42, Simon McVittie 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?

I want to avoid changing this from anthy to mozc-jp, and then getting
a second bug report from a different Japanese user saying that we
need to change it back!


My impression from the Ubuntu side is that there is a consensus. 
ibus-mozc has been preferred over ibus-anthy since Ubuntu 16.04 at the 
request of Japanese Ubuntu users. I can't recall any user request since 
then to change the default Japanese IBus IM.


There is a point of concern, though: mozc upstream seems to be moving 
towards replacing gtk with qt. Since the main Ubuntu ISO does not 
include qt, that may result in an undesired change of Ubuntu's default 
in the end. Not sure if qt would be a problem for Debian.


But even if there is a risk that Debian would need to change again in a 
later release, the current situation is an inconsistency between the 
installer and gnome-initial-setup. So to me it sounds reasonable to make 
the suggested change to mozc-jp in Debian 12. Doing it the other way 
around wouldn't have much user support AFAICT.



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.


I don't know the reasoning behind that. Not long ago riscv64 was added 
to the list due to , and it proved to 
build on that arch without issues. So possibly mozc can be built on more 
architectures without a hassle, if that is desired.



I'm also concerned that mozc still depends on GTK 2 (a switch to GTK
3 was tried and then reverted, see #967641).


I did that reversal, sorry. But it was for a good reason. The patch is 
still in the source (but disabled), and maybe just needs a bit more work.


--
Gunnar

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

[Shengjing Zhu]

Hi

On Thu, Mar 2, 2023 at 5:43 PM Simon McVittie  wrote:
>
> Control: tags -1 + moreinfo
>
> On Sat, 28 Jan 2023 at 16:46:35 +0900, YOSHINO Yoshihito wrote:
> > As mentioned in Bug #984875, gnome-initial-setup's default choice of
> > input method is hardcoded in the dependent libgnome-desktop-4-2 package.
> > The Japanese one is anthy
> > https://sources.debian.org/src/gnome-desktop/43.1-1/libgnome-desktop/default-input-sources.h/#L39
> > preferred by upstream (Fedora/Red Hat) perhaps because its code base is
> > simple and easy to maintain, while this is not suitable for most Debian
> > Japanese users, who use mozc because of its better conversion quality,
> > thus task-japanese-gnome-desktop and task-japanese-desktop has preferred
> > mozc over anthy. So the hardcoded value should be adjusted for our
> > users.
>
> 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?
>
> I want to avoid changing this from anthy to mozc-jp, and then getting a
> second bug report from a different Japanese user saying that we need to
> change it back!
>

I'm not a Japanese user. But I've been frustrated in the last few days
of the Bullseye release, when Gnome's upstream choice conflicts with
Debian's tasksel.

The problem is that in Debian's tasksel, it has the prefered input
method. So if the Debian system is installed by our default installer,
the user can't have out of box input experience.

So if neither taksel or Gnome in Debian is going to change, it really
hurts our users.

-- 
Shengjing Zhu

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

[Simon McVittie]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo

On Sat, 28 Jan 2023 at 16:46:35 +0900, YOSHINO Yoshihito wrote:
> As mentioned in Bug #984875, gnome-initial-setup's default choice of
> input method is hardcoded in the dependent libgnome-desktop-4-2 package.
> The Japanese one is anthy
> https://sources.debian.org/src/gnome-desktop/43.1-1/libgnome-desktop/default-input-sources.h/#L39
> preferred by upstream (Fedora/Red Hat) perhaps because its code base is
> simple and easy to maintain, while this is not suitable for most Debian
> Japanese users, who use mozc because of its better conversion quality,
> thus task-japanese-gnome-desktop and task-japanese-desktop has preferred
> mozc over anthy. So the hardcoded value should be adjusted for our
> users.

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?

I want to avoid changing this from anthy to mozc-jp, and then getting a
second bug report from a different Japanese user saying that we need to
change it back!

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.

How does this interact with the default being mozc-jp? Do we need to use
a #ifdef to make the default be mozc on architectures that have it, and
anthy on architectures that don't?

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.

> 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.

The only issue reports I could find upstream are
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-desktop/-/issues/181 which is about
switching the default from kkc to anthy, and
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/issues/104 which is
older and refers to kkc as being the default.

On Wed, 22 Feb 2023 at 15:09:15 +0900, ken...@xdump.org wrote:
>   Thus with attached patch, gnome-initial-setup will not
>   show label for mozc-jp as "日本語 (Mozc)" by default.

What would be the best label to be displayed there?

What is actually displayed instead?

>   To display label correctly, fetch_ibus_engines_result must be called 
>   in advance.

That's probably not possible: fetch_ibus_engines_result is called
asynchronously with the result of a D-Bus method call, so it's already
called as early as possible, and before that point we don't have the
necessary information.

Probably the best we can do there is to hard-code a special case for
mozc-jp.

smcv

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

[James Addison]

Package: libgnome-desktop-4-2
Followup-For: Bug #1029821
X-Debbugs-Cc: yy.y.ja...@gmail.com

I'd like to contribute by testing d-i with Japanese input (I'm not a Japanese
speaker, but can offer some time to help).

My plan is to:

  1. run the graphical d-i install of a fresh GNOME 43 system
  2. select 'anthy' in 'gnome-initial-setup'
  3. attempt Japanese keyboard input

  4. run the graphical d-i install of a fresh GNOME 43 system
  5. select 'mozc-jp' in 'gnome-initial-setup'
  6. attempt Japanese keyboard input

For each path I may need help: how will I verify that Japanese input support
is working?  (maybe a naive question, but I don't know; I will search the web
to find out soon, but any guidance before then would be appreciated)

Also:

My understanding is that the _only_ difference that the patch will make is
that it will change the default in 'gnome-initial-setup'.  Users could still
choose 'anthy' -- or another input method -- if they want, for some reason.  Is
that correct?

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

[YOSHINO Yoshihito]

Package: libgnome-desktop-4-2
Followup-For: Bug #1029821
X-Debbugs-Cc: yy.y.ja...@gmail.com

Dear Maintainer,

As mentioned in Bug #984875, gnome-initial-setup's default choice of
input method is hardcoded in the dependent libgnome-desktop-4-2 package.
The Japanese one is anthy
https://sources.debian.org/src/gnome-desktop/43.1-1/libgnome-desktop/default-input-sources.h/#L39
preferred by upstream (Fedora/Red Hat) perhaps because its code base is
simple and easy to maintain, while this is not suitable for most Debian
Japanese users, who use mozc because of its better conversion quality,
thus task-japanese-gnome-desktop and task-japanese-desktop has preferred
mozc over anthy. So the hardcoded value should be adjusted for our
users.

Attaching a patch to change the Japanese default to mozc.

Thanks in advance,

-- 
YOSHINO Yoshihito 
Description: Use mozc as the default input source for Japanese
 Upstream prefers ibus-anthy for Japanese input, while Debian uses
 ibus-mozc as the default.
Author: YOSHINO Yoshihito 
Origin: vendor
Forwarded: not-needed
Last-Update: 2023-01-28

Index: gnome-desktop-43.1/libgnome-desktop/default-input-sources.h
===
--- gnome-desktop-43.1.orig/libgnome-desktop/default-input-sources.h
+++ gnome-desktop-43.1/libgnome-desktop/default-input-sources.h
@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ static DefaultInputSource default_input_
   { "hi_IN","ibus", "m17n:hi:inscript" },
   { "id_ID","xkb",  "us" },
   { "it_IT","xkb",  "it" },
-  { "ja_JP","ibus", "anthy" },
+  { "ja_JP","ibus", "mozc-jp" },
   { "kn_IN","ibus", "m17n:kn:kgp" },
   { "ko_KR","ibus", "hangul" },
   { "mai_IN",   "ibus", "m17n:mai:inscript" },