[bug#44354] [PATCH] gnu: gnome-deskop-service-type: Set GUIX_GTK*_IM_MODULE_FILE.

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at> writes:

>> > > I don’t know if setting them is the correct thing to do for 
>> > > Gnome. 
>> > > This patch would also only work for system-wide 
>> > > installations 
>> > > of 
>> > > input methods.  Input methods that have been installed in a 
>> > > user 
>> > > profile would not be part of the cache files.
>> > I'm not sure we can expect things to "just work" with ibus in 
>> > the user
>> > profile.  As far as I'm aware, we don't expect GDM to find 
>> > the 
>> > user's
>> > custom gnome installation without some hacking on their part, 
>> > so 
>> > I
>> > don't understand why we would expect GNOME to find ibus in a 
>> > similar
>> > setup.
>> 
>> Because it worked just like that before.
>> 
>> Ibus should be a user process with user configuration.  This is 
>> not inherently global, so only making it work with globally 
>> installed input methods is a restriction that I think we should 
>> aim to do without.
> What is a "user process with user configuration" here?  The way 
> I
> understand those words, is that
> a. the process is launched under the user's account, and
> b. the configuration for that process lies in the user's 
> directory.
> Certainly, those two hold for ibus.  But they also hold for 
> gnome,
> which should not be inherently global either by the above 
> argument. 
> Yet managing gnome system-wide is significantly easier than 
> managing it
> per-user.

“easier” is not the question here.  We have always tried to avoid 
giving special importance to the system profile.  It’s a matter of 
flexibility.  Users on a shared system should have the option to 
have their own set of input methods.

Gnome uses dbus extensively, so it should be able to talk to the 
user’s ibus daemon over dbus and offer available input methods 
this way.  Perhaps we can get rid of static IM_MODULE_FILEs and 
the problem of monolithic cache files, etc.

> Also note, that my patch would not bar you from setting
> GUIX_GTK*_IM_MODULE_FILE to something else if you indeed have a 
> local
> ibus setup.  I'd even go so far as to argue, that it doesn't 
> make your
> setup more difficult at all.  All it does is make things easier 
> for
> those who want a global gnome+ibus setup.

There may be a misunderstanding here: I don’t *have* a setup.  As 
it is, ibus(-libpinyin) does not work reliably with Gnome.

My main point here is that I’d rather we take a step back to see 
if all this GUIX_GTK* variable patching is still worth doing, and 
whether there are better ways we could achieve a reliable 
configuration of ibus — no matter if that’s a global configuration 
or a per-user one.

-- 
Ricardo