2012/3/25 Aric Stewart aric@codeweavers.com:
Hi,
As a developer who has done a lot of work in the IME/XIM areas of wine I thought I would chime in.
The IME/XIM stuff sounds interesting but I am really not sure how useful it is going to be. I will have to review what the GSoC outline is like but it feels like something that would not really get into wine not would regularly get used by people outside of wine. If you want to flesh it out a bit more I could maybe see where you are going with it but it feels more like a project "Making use of Wine" instead of "Improving Wine"
I'm a Chinese speaker. More specifically, I write simplified Chinese, and I use the most popular Chinese input method - pinyin[1], which in turn is the official Chinese romanization scheme in mainland China. Over 80% of Chinese users won't bother to learn another input method - the estimation may still be conservative.
In the Unix world side - it's a shame, but fair to say, developers have failed to ship a decent pinyin IME. There has been various efforts, that is ibus-pinyin[2], fcitx[3], sunpinyin[4], google-pinyin[5], and most lately libpinyin[6], but they still suffer from a lack of manpower and developer interest. In fact, lack of a decent pinyin IME has been a major blocker to Linux adoption in mainland China.
Therefore Wine IME, if realized, is not only going to be useful; it's going to be *really* useful. According to me, part of Wine's spirit is to resolve bug 10000 and get Microsoft out of business :) but the other part ought to be to bring the best of Windows world into Unix world. I'm following _that_ aim, precisely.
This is not a discouragement, just an invitation to sell it to me more. Make me see why you think this would be good for IME in Wine.
-aric
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin 2. http://code.google.com/p/ibus/ and https://github.com/phuang/ibus-pinyin 3. http://code.google.com/p/fcitx/ 4. http://code.google.com/p/sunpinyin/ 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pinyin 6. https://github.com/libpinyin/libpinyin/wiki