Comment 11 for bug 947908

- why is ibus behaving differently in Fedora than Debian?
No idea.

- isn't the screenshot in the previous comment showing the keyboard switcher rather than ibus (the input method menu)?

the fedora screenshot is different from the ubuntu one. The second row of the fedora one shows which mode (Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese) of the output is. The mode is a filter to filter out the words and only shows the words which are in that mode. The mode choosing row is not in the ubuntu. This is noting about the input method, it is just about the output mode.

For example, 戰(Traditional) and 战(Simplified) are the same word in Chinese, the input method PinYin are using the same code to represent those words. So, the iBus engine itself has a word filter to filter out this 2 words, if you are in Simplified mode, it will filter out the Traditional one and give out simplified. Which the flow is make scene in PinYin in Mainland China as they use simplified Chinese, but not in HK and Taiwan.

As en environment on default is at simplified mode because the current code is only choose to use Traditional Chinese mode when seeing locale is zh_HK or zh_TW. And as the UI does not have a place to choose which mode I would like to use, we cannot type Traditional Chinese in en_HK or zh_TW locale as the ibus-table thinking we are using Simplified Chinese but actually it is not.

If we use other input method such as Cangjie, although 戰(Traditional) and 战(Simplified) are the same word in Chinese, they have different input code, 戰 is "rji" and 战 is "yri". If ibus is at Simplified Chinese mode, it doesn't give me a word 戰 even if I type a right cangjie code "rji" as the Simplified mode will filter out all the Traditional words.

- is the issue in ibus-table?
Yes. the problem is inside "engine/table.py"

- did anyone try those 2 commits? are they enough to fix the issue?
Yes, I have tried it. they are enough to fix the issue but not the perfect one.

The issues had been there for a few years when iBus come out.
Most of the people, when they were facing this problem, will change to use scim and gcin.
But as scim and gcin are going to remove from the upstream, this problem is now coming up again and becoming a big concern.