Bug#633106: Is google pinyin better now?
On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 11:35, Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Few months ago, I had a try with Google pinyin. But I gave up, because
> it wasn't good enough: it crashed, and couldn't guess words based on the
> one you typed before, because upstream code simply didn't have the
> feature that wasn't ported from the Java version. At the time,
> GooglePinyin wasn't remotely comparable to the Windows version.
>
This Google Pinyin is the one works on android devices, it's not
designed to compare with the one on Windows, but I should admit this
one is better than ibus-pinyin, and sunpinyin prior to 2.0.4 (not
released yet).
It was unstable on Linux, and I guess it was because the program is
designed for a different libc - android does not use glibc/eglibc
which we use. Now libgooglepinyin has fixed most things so it's quite
stable now.
> So, I am wondering, is GooglePinyin better now, and can it be remotely
> compared to SunPinyin, which is well maintained already, and that I've
> been using for a very long time? Aren't we seeing too many input methods
> in Debian, for no real benefits (just see how many pinyin methods we
> have...)?
>
When it becomes much more stable, you'll find it's far better than Sun
Pinyin (especially before 2.0.4, which has been tried integrated
things from googlepinyin). I'm not sure about the details of input
model, but AFAIK the dict of Sunpinyin is very poor comparing with
googlepinyin's one.
> I'm not willing to point fingers at here, just trying to understand what
> you are doing, making sure that GooglePinyin is valuable enough, and
> that we don't have better options already (eg: sunpinyin, which already
> has a pretty good grammar analysis to predict words).
>
> Thomas
>
In fact we don't have a better dict than googlepinyin's one in open
source world, and we don't have another lightweight solution.
libgooglepinyin is very small in size (the binary is no more than
400KiB, the dict is only 1.5MiB, while others have several MiB to tens
of MiB), and has better user experience than any other existing input
methods, so I believe it's worthwhile.
--
Regards,
Aron Xu
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