Draft: Remove fcitx5 from *-gnome-desktop and *-desktop

Jeremy Bícharequested to merge
jbicha/tasksel:bye-gnome-fcitx into master
  • GNOME has decided to only integrate IBus since 2012 (with GNOME 3.6)
  • Move fcitx recommendations to the corresponding -kde-desktop tasks since KDE's Settings app integrates both IBus and Fcitx
  • Copy IBus recommendations from -gnome-desktop to the corresponding -desktop task
  • Remove uim from task-japanese-desktop since IBus and Fcitx are input method frameworks that are better integrated into desktops now

I don't use any input methods myself, but I'm trying to do what I can to improve Debian.

It looks like fcitx was only added to tasksel in efee9baf because scim-tables was removed from Debian. scim-tables happened to be quickly reintroduced to Debian, but Debian maintainers didn't want to recommend it any more. See https://bugs.debian.org/681466 and https://bugs.debian.org/659309 for some background.

My understanding is that ibus and fcitx are popular maintained input method frameworks with support for different input method engines (also called editors). According to a quick look at the table from https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Input_method, ibus appears to support a few more engines than fcitx does. Because of GNOME's decision and influence, ibus seems to be a reasonable choice for Debian to recommend. On the other hand, fcitx might be preferred in Qt environments like Plasma and LXQt.

fcitx is not "harmless" in GNOME. It includes 3 .desktop files which clutter the default Activities Overview. Debian Live currently installs all the language tasks to try to make things more useful for people with various preferred languages.

Other Info

uim's README says that its development was partially funded by Japan's Information Technology Promotion Agency. I don't think that means it is a better choice for Japanese users than the other input method frameworks. cc/ @knok @osamu

fcitx-table* depends on fcitx-table so I removed the extra line.

ibus-anthy depends on anthy so I removed the direct dependency on anthy. mozc is recommended over anthy but mozc has some RC bugs that are temporarily keeping it out of Testing.

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