Fedora 7: SCIM Launch Problem

[Jens Petersen]

Hi Warren,

I was away from Wednesday last week so sorry for not being able to 
follow up quickly.

Thank you for bringing this up for wider discussion. :)

A few comments:

Warren Togami wrote:
> 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.

Actually we would really appreciate more bug reports against scim 
detailing all the problems of running it by default so that they could 
be addressed.

> 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.

My thinking was that it is easier for infrequent scim-users just to use 
the mouse to activate and deactivate scim: rather than having to go into 
im-chooser and restart their desktop.

> 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.

True, but I don't see it as such a big problem.

> - This forces certain users to use a confusingly disjoint configuration
> within SCIM Setup, which is separate from im-chooser.  (User confusion)

But unfortunately the reverse is also true: turning off scim by default 
forces users to use im-chooser to turn it on.

> - This still has an unnecessary memory footprint for users who
> absolutely never need SCIM.

Yep.


> 1) Undo the hack made in Bug #235435.

Ok.  I would still like to encourage more discussion on the default 
hotkey binding.  I am not convinced that Ctrl-Space is the best default 
choice, even though it is the current defacto choice.  AFAIK the main 
reason Ctrl-Space is the current default is because it is commonly used 
by Chinese IMs.  It conflicts with common keybindings in emacs, eclipse 
and other applications.

> 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.

We considered this solution and though I can see it is probably the most 
pragmatic solution, I was reluctant to go that way since I see it a 
regression in behaviour.  To me having scim run by default when 
installed provided a much better user experience than having to turn it 
on manually.  But I can see that in the context of the livecd and the 
new comps this is probably the best we can do at this time.

> 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.

I can certainly modify the scim side easily this week so there should be 
enough time to test it for F7.

Jens