Comment 28 for bug 1768166

I have been hearing this swan song for several years now that ibus-pinyin
is being or has been deprecated. Actually it is a miracle that ibus-pinyin
still works in Ubuntu--*and only in Ubuntu*. For unknown and very strange
reasons, I can never make ibus-pinyin work in Fedora, or even in Debian.
Indeed, this is the main reason that I am sticking with Ubuntu, even though
I was one of the very first supporters of the Fedora Linux when it was
being developed at the University of Hawaii.

Most Linux users in the Chinese Ubuntu forum actually use Sogou pinyin
(搜狗拼音）, this is a proprietary program running on the fcitx input
framework. Sogou pinyin is definitely better than ibus-libpinyin (very few
people actually use ibus-libpinyin), but is inferior to ibus-pinyin in
terms of speed and stability. We have a pro bono project in Honolulu
teaching seniors to be proficient in computers. Since many of our students
are of Chinese descent, our program also includes teaching them how to
input Chinese characters. Ibus-pinyin has been our choice of Chinese input
tool because of its snappiness and being trouble-free. You would think
that these two characters should also make ibus-pinyin a favorable Chinese
input engine? But since so few people in China are using Linux desktops,
logic doesn't make sense. It is the so-called upstream developers (mainly
Peng Wu of Red Hat), or the lack thereof (ibus-pinyin developers), that
prevails.

Based on my interactions with many Chinese Ubuntu forum elders, I am NOT
surprised that the upstream developers do not think highly of ibus-pinyin.
The reasons are three-fold: first, they are not using the right distro
(i.e., not using Ubuntu); second, they did not install a Ubuntu-specific
ibus-pinyin database (i.e., system-wide vocabulary); and third, they have
not used ibus-pinyin long enough (i.e., they do not have their own user
vocabulary).

I think upstream developers do not like ibus-pinyin also because it does
not have many bells and whistles (e.g., inputting emojis which I absolutely
could care less). But ibus-pinyin also has some of the critical features
that are lacking in ibus-libpinyin. For example, the latter cannot
conveniently input special symbols (many in the Chinese Ubuntu forum think
this a main reason not to use ibus-libpinyin). Also, ibus-libpinyin will
treat a decimal point as a Chinese period, such as 19。04 (which should be
19.04）. But most important AFAIC, ibus-pinyin uses a simple,
straightforward sqlite database structure that is very easy to comprehend.
How the table-lookup database is structured in ibus-libpinyin is
complicated and undocumented.

Many members of the Chinese Ubuntu forum have a very negative attitude
towards ibus-libpinyin partly because of the personality of its principal
developer Peng Wu. They have always complained about being contemptuously
snobbed when they visited the ibus-libpinyin GitHub forum (many were told
to switch to Fedora). I myself also could never get a straight answer from
Peng Wu.

I sincerely hope that your effort to make ibus-libpinyin stable ("stable"
in an absolute sense) will help attracting more users--ibus-libpinyin in
specific and Ubuntu in general. I will definitely use it at least
occasionally to make sure that everything is OK. Should Ubuntu
powers-that-be make an unfortunate decision and drop ibus-pinyin from its
archive, I will simply freeze my version of Ubuntu at 18.04, which is now
turning out to be exceptionally good.

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 9:20 PM Gunnar Hjalmarsson <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> @Ping-Wu: ibus-pinyin will soon be removed from the archive.
>
> $ zcat /usr/share/doc/ibus-pinyin/NEWS.Debian.gz
> ibus-pinyin (1.5.0-5) unstable; urgency=medium
>
> Package ibus-pinyin is now deprecated; its upstream has stopped
> development
> for years in favour of new ibus-libpinyin. New ibus users should
> install
> ibus-libpinyin instead of this package. This package (ibus-pinyin)
> will be
> removed after Debian Buster (Debian 10) release.
>
> -- Boyuan Yang <email address hidden> Tue, 18 Sep 2018 16:53:42 -0400
>
> Seems like it won't be present in the Ubuntu 20.04 archive.
>
> So let's focus 100% on ibus-libpinyin at this bug report.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1768166
>
> Title:
> Random crashes
>
> Status in ibus-libpinyin package in Ubuntu:
> Fix Released
> Status in libpinyin package in Ubuntu:
> Fix Released
> Status in ibus-libpinyin source package in Bionic:
> Fix Committed
> Status in libpinyin source package in Bionic:
> Fix Committed
> Status in ibus-libpinyin source package in Cosmic:
> Fix Committed
> Status in libpinyin source package in Cosmic:
> Fix Committed
>
> Bug description:
> [Impact]
>
> ibus-libpinyin has proved to crash far too often. One or more files in
> ~/.cache/ibus/libpinyin get corrupted somehow, and emptying that
> directory allows the user to keep using ibus-libpinyin.
>
> In disco (and eoan) ibus-libpinyin 1.11.0 and libpinyin 2.2.2 are
> present, and the number of crashes has been reduced significantly:
>
> https://errors.ubuntu.com/?package=ibus-libpinyin&period=month
>
> Upstream ChangeLog ibus-libpinyin:
> ----------------------------------
> version 1.11.0
> * fixes keypad decimal
> * fixes emoji candidates
> * support configurable opencc config
>
> version 1.10.92
> * fixes Enter handling
>
> version 1.10.91
> * support ime.register_trigger in lua extension
> * support predicted candidates
> * support emoji input
>
> version 1.10.0
> * bug fixes
>
> version 1.9.91
> * migrate to use GSettings
> * fixes lyx short cut issue
>
> version 1.9.3
> * translate input method name in ibus menu
>
> Upstream ChangeLog libpinyin:
> -----------------------------
> version 2.2.2
> * minor fixes
>
> version 2.2.1
> * fixes predicted candidates
>
> version 2.2.0
> * bug fixes
>
> The proposal is to backport the disco versions of those packages to
> bionic and cosmic in an attempt to prevent crashes. Proposed uploads
> are available in this PPA:
>
> https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj/+archive/ubuntu/ibus-libpinyin
>
> [Test Case]
>
> * Install from {bionic,cosmic}-proposed:
> - libpinyin13
> - libpinyin-data
> - ibus-libpinyin
>
> * Use "Intelligent Pinyin" for typing and confirm that no new issues
> show up when doing so.
>
> (This is apparently not a confirmation that the upload really fixes
> the bug. To compensate for that, we will await testing of the
> -proposed packages by a few Chinese users before considering the
> uploads verified.)
>
> Reverse dependencies
> --------------------
> Besides ibus-libpinyin, also fcitx-libpinyin and ibus-libzhuyin depend
> on packages belonging to the libpinyin source package. So additional test
> measures are:
>
> * Install fcitx-libpinyin and ibus-libzhuyin.
>
> * Use both those tools for typing Chinese, and confirm that you don't
> observe any adverse effects of the libpinyin upgrade.
>
> [Regression Potential]
>
> The changes are mostly bug fixes, so the regression risk should be
> limited. Also consider that the starting point is a rather unstable
> functionality.
>
> NOTE TO SRU TEAM: Please let the SRU age for longer than 7 days to get
> as much testing as possible. There do not seem to be too many risky
> changes carried, but such jumps in upstream versions always carry some
> regression-risk.
>
> [Original description]
>
> I have experienced random ibus-libpinyin crashes in bionic. I cannot
> reproduce it, but it occurred at least a few times, even after the
> official bionic release. Same crashes were also reported in the
> Ubuntu Chinese forum.
>
> Currently, the workaround is to delete the ~/.cache/ibus/libpinyin
> folder.
>
> I talked to Peng Wu, ibus-libpinyin's creator and main maintainer, he
> suggested that we update the version of ibus-libpinyin to 1.10.
>
> Can we give this update a trial?
>
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