Comment 20 for bug 1551283

On 2016-03-07 02:04, Tim wrote:
> however I did notice your use of XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP is not
> consistent with the spec.

Thanks for mentioning that. Then I suppose that replacing

"$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" != 'GNOME'

with

"${XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP%%-*}" != 'GNOME'

takes care of it.

I have now installed Ubuntu GNOME and made some observations:

On a fresh Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 install I added the Japanese language including the suggested language support. For me it pulled exactly the same packages as gnome-language-selector would have done, so there is no reason to install gnome-language-selector for that reason.

After having logged out and logged in again, I found "Japanese (Mozc)" among the input sources and added it. Then I could open gedit, select "Japanese (Mozc)" and type beautiful characters: 絵画井笥 :) (Mozc is pulled in 16.04; previously it was Anthy. But I installed ibus-anthy manually, and could type Japanese with Anthy too.)

Then I changed the display language to Japanese, and now it was broken. Some of the IM related environment variables had been set to fcitx (even if XMODIFIERS and QT_IM_MODULE had been set to ibus by gnome-session) and fcitx had been started by im-config. After having commented the setting of the IM_CONFIG_PREFERRED_RULE variable in /etc/default/im-config, I could type using IBus also with Japanese as the display language.

(I failed to change the display language with Region & Language, and had to do it manually. However, using Region & Language for the purpose worked after I had used gnome-language-selector to switch language once, and thus created ~/.pam_environment and set the "Language" and "FormatsLocale" values in /var/lib/AccountsService/users/gunnar!? But that's a separate issue.)

So one conclusion is that im-config should indeed not set IM_CONFIG_PREFERRED_RULE on Ubuntu GNOME.

It's also clear that if users shall have a chance to use fcitx, gnome-session must not set those variables. (But this is probably not the most urgent thing right now.)

I played with user specific im-config settings using the "Input Method" GUI. IBus typing seems to work with any of the values "none", "xim" and "ibus", since two of the IM related environment variables are set by gnome-session anyway. Can't help feeling that "ibus" (i.e. in accordance with the current proposal in the PPA) is the safest and most sensible choice, though.