Unity's fcitx integration has become obsolete

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Unity integrates both ibus and fcitx. At least it used to. What I mean by that is that if you use e.g. fcitx, you can manage also fcitx input sources from Text Entry, and no Fcitx icon is shown in the top bar.

But time goes by, and the version of fcitx supported by Unity (fcitx 4) is deprecated and replaced by fcitx 5. As from Ubuntu 21.10 language-selector-common pulls fcitx 5 for Chinese users instead of fcitx 4.

So something should be done about this. I can think of two options:

1. Adapt the fcitx integration to work with fcitx 5.

2. Drop the fcitx integration, and let fcitx 5 do its thing alongside Text Entry etc.

I chose to submit this bug against unity-control-center, but I'm pretty sure that more packages are affected.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

@Aron: If I recall correctly, you were heavily involved in implementing the fcitx integration. Do you have any thoughts on the best way to handle it now?

[Khurshid Alam (khurshid-alam)]

Yes it doesn't work anymore. Dropping it from control-center seems sensible. Not sure how much work it would be to port it to 5.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

On 2022-04-10 20:50, Khurshid Alam wrote:
> Not sure how much work it would be to port it to 5.

Me neither. That's why I pinged Aron. But my gut feeling is that it wouldn't be very hard.

Note that whichever route you choose, u-c-c is not the only affected package.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Bug #1363150 is one bug used for tracking the original fcitx integration.