Ubuntu moving towards Wayland

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 12:29 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 02:50:15PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Sat, 2010-11-06 at 16:41 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > 
> > > Really, I have no
> > > problem using my keyboard,
> > 
> > Given your location and native language, I suspect your keyboard layout
> > is en_US, in which case this isn't much of a surprise - it's one of the
> > simplest cases (it requires one of the fewest numbers of characters of
> > any layout) and it's also the one which gets most attention, development
> > and testing.
> > 
> > If you spoke Chinese - or, even better, something Indic - you may have a
> > different perspective. =)
> 
> Just to clear this up, I'm using a UK keyboard and switch
> between English and Japanese input (Anthy).

d'oh, right, too many Joneses around, I forgot you were the one who uses
Japanese too. =)

well, I imagine you know more about this than me, but I run with
Japanese input support at least occasionally, and my impression is that
a lot of it is a fragile tower necessitated by the fact that the deep
underlying stuff was coded with the assumption that all anyone ever
wanted to type was ASCII. It feels to me like CJK input breaks a lot
more than it really *should*, if you step back and look at it from first
principles - it's just an input method, and we'd feel pretty dumb if we
shipped a release where you can't type the letter Q, yet this sort of
thing seems to happen all the time with non-en_US input. From a QA
perspective, I know keyboard layout selection and complex character
input is one of the things that breaks so often we had to stick an
explicit validation test in for it. I don't know how much of this is
related to X specifically, but I know it's certainly one of the things
involved which makes the whole process of providing switchable input
methods so icky.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net