[Pkg-ime-devel] Reminder: Freeze of Wheezy is approaching

[Aron Xu]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 17:48, Osamu Aoki <osamu at debian.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 02:11:55PM +0800, Aron Xu wrote:
>>
>> I sent some emails to Chinese communities asking the users opinon
>> yesterday, and I got some objections that said SCIM supports some
>> features that other existing input method frameworks do not have:
>> 1.Uniform user defined words
>
> I do not understand this ...
>

This means users can define a phrase for any input method/table in a
uniform way.

>> 2.Many many usable tables (as in table based input methods)
>
> Actually, this is another problem.  IBus did a lot of license reviews and
> dropped problematic input method.  SCIM did not do that yet.
>
>  http://code.google.com/p/ibus/wiki/ChineseTableLicenseAuditing
>

This is a very incomplete list, though it provides some information.
Actually many tables are used widely neglecting the copyright/license
information in the past. Until today some of the most popular ones are
"expected" to be expired in patent, and others become very unclear
because nobody know what they actually be made from.

When somebody claims he has copyright of a table, and soon put it in
public domain, we don't actually know if he really was the copyright
holder, or what material did he used when he was making the table. Be
aware that the used corpus might also be copyrighted and licensed
under something that make the table non-free.

> | Not all of the Chinese input tables are actually free for Linux/BSD to
> | distribute. So of them do, but others may have additional term and
> | conditional attach to them, like no commercial use, or have to contact
> | the author for authorization.
> |
> | Some of the table authors are not known or uncontactable.
> |
> | Note: Chinese intellect property office does not reveal the expire date.
> |
> | Zhuyin is not included, as without end-key or other state support, it
> | does not work well in ibus-table.
>

We are shipping quite a few tables in Debian, and we just ensure they
don't have obvious license problem (for example dayi3 is always
excluded because there is a clear, not dfsg-free declaration of
copyright and license). For others, we can only deal with them on a
case by case manner, that is to say, if a table is discovered to have
something embarrassing, we act on it.

>> > Rolf is the one who insisted to keep SCIM. (He pushed many patches
>> > upstream but seems to have difficulties to package new upstream.
>> > Anyway, I cced him with this email so he will know this issue.
>> >
>> > As I remember for scim (1.4.9-3), in which I used autoreconf.  It caused
>> > all sorts of headache.  autoreconf causes build failure if autotools
>> > changes significantly unless upstream is active enough to keep up these
>> > changes.
>> >
>>
>> I can help him for a single version if he insist on keeping SCIM, but
>> I don't want to `maintain' it.
>
> Well ... if you wish ....
>

No, I don't want to do it. But if we keep SCIM for Wheezy, we should
keep the stack working. I won't volunteer to help it after Wheezy,
except supporting the stable distribution that has been released
officially.

In fact I am thing if we are too late to remove it, because we haven't
given users warned for a period of time that is long enough.

> Please remember our resources are limitted.  IBUS being supported by
> Redhat with active, knowlegeable and friendly developers, we should
> think about fixing ibus first.
>

Obviously yes. IBus is the most used platform today, it's our top priority.

>> > I also realized ibus is FTBFS now.  I will work on this FTBFS and maybe
>> > on packaging ibus-fbterm.  This seems missing in ibus family. (SCIM does
>> > not have equivalent)
>> >
>>
>> IIRC ibus-fbterm is already abandoned upstream for sometime.
>
> I see.
>
>> > FYI: (From Daiki)
>> > FTBFS of ibus can be fixed by using fix documented in automake upstream
>> > http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/commit/?id=4e4dae50
>
> Filed bug report...
>  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=657828
>
> If you have time and Daiki has not give us patch, please help me fixing
> this.
>
> Osamu
>

Already replied to the bug, you can proceed with an upload if you
think necessary.

-- 
Regards,
Aron Xu