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 <https://bugs.debian.org/992035>, 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