[Development] Request to delete libibusplatforminputcontextplugin.so from qtbase

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday 22 July 2015 12:41:11 Takao Fujiwara wrote:
> On 07/22/15 00:49, Thiago Macieira-san wrote:
> > On Tuesday 21 July 2015 16:00:45 Takao Fujiwara wrote:
> >>> We don't develop gtk. We do develop Qt4 and we know that supporting
> >>> complex
> >>> input methods with it was a pain and it often regressed due to lack of
> >>> testing. I think limiting the testing is doing a disservice to our
> >>> users.
> >> 
> >> However I guess you won't complete IBus testings since there are various
> >> functionalities by languages.
> > 
> > So you're saying that the Qt testing isn't enough, but IBus itself could
> > test more? That is, if the Qt IBus plugin lives as part of IBus, it will
> > get better development and better testing than it does today inside the
> > Qt sources?
> Yes, I think it's better to develop and test the IBus plugin together on
> ibus-qt. qtbase is a big source tree to develop the plugin.

I don't see how the size of a tree is an argument. The Linux kernel is 10x 
bigger than qtbase and people seem fine developing things in-tree there.

The argument you're putting forward is that IBus would take better care of 
testing the plugin and aligning it with IBus features.

What we need convincing is whether the fact that it won't suffer because it 
can't track Qt and the QPA API as closely as it does now. Looking at the 20 
most recent changes to the plugin, almost half are cleanups and updates that 
don't add functionality.

Another important factor to remember is that the Qt Project distributes 
binaries for Linux. Right now, they contain the IBus plugin because it's part 
of qtbase. If it is moved out of tree and its build system is complex, we may 
not ship the plugin anymore and, thus, make it impossible for complex input 
methods to work in user applications that use our binaries (including the Qt 
Creator we ship). So if it's moved out of tree, we will require:

 a) a simple build system, which is not the current one either

 b) that IBus makes sure that the plugin is ready to be released according to 
    Qt's release schedule. If it fails to compile, we won't ship it.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center