I would like to input Japanese on Fedora. I currently use Fedora Silverblue, so by default, ibus-anthy is the input method engine I can choose to work with as it's what is installed by default. I'd like to see that change.
ibus-anthy
Fedora used ibus-anthy for a long time, and then switched to ibus-kkc in Fedora 19. Then, in 2020 for Fedora 34, Fedora switched back to ibus-anthy because neither lib-kkc nor ibus-kkc had received updates for a few years: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ibus-anthy_for_default_Japanese_IME
ibus-kkc
lib-kkc
ibus-skk was the input method used long before either, created in 1987 and maintained by the same author as kkc. It has also not seen any updates for a few years and is not a viable option. I don't know if it was ever the default, but it's available in Fedora today.
ibus-skk
kkc
Anthy, the underlying Japanese input method engine, has actually been dead for over a decade at this point, longer than kkc. Anthy was forked a few years ago and Fedora currently uses anthy-unicode: https://github.com/fujiwarat/anthy-unicode
It's well-maintained but from what I can see, not very actively developed.
Mozc is a Google open source project and sees very active development. It uses a Qt-based renderer as opposed to GTK. It's what Google uses for Android and Chrome OS.
ibus-mozc
I'd really like to see Mozc and Anthy installed by default, as the only Japanese IMEs left standing. I think Mozc is better than Anthy, which comes by virtue of being so actively developed by a large company, but Anthy does use GTK while Mozc uses Qt, so theoretically it should fit into the GNOME desktop more. So that's a reason for Anthy to stay.
On the other hand, the dark GTK background makes it harder for me to read. So while Mozc looks slightly out of place, it's more readable for me and it doesn't have much of an interface anyway.
The problem with mozc is that Google has switched the build system to Bazel so it is practically impossible currently now to update mozc further in Fedora currently. The Qt dependency is also slightly problematic for a Gnome Workstation experience.
@tagoh who also has maintained the Fedora mozc package for many years can shed more light on why we have decided not to use mozc as the default IME for Japanese until now.
The last Fedora version update was made last June 2023.
Ah...Bazel. I first heard about that build system when Anki adopted it for a time and the troubles it caused. Of all the blockers I thought might come up, I didn't expect that.
So really, it's likely that Anthy is going to be the only still-maintained Japanese IME that is possible to build offline in the foreseeable future unless Google lands improvements in Bazel such that it facilitates offline building.
Or at least, that's my layman's understanding of it from what I read about Anki.
I was using Arch recently. I noticed that they haven't built a new version of fcitx5-mozc for the past 2 years either...
For a bit detailed background, our packaged version of mozc still relies on gyp to build which was previously supported build system. We could managed to update it with a few patches but Google did some clean up on their repository about a year ago. This was critical for us because they dropped gtk+ version of helper application and related gyp files. it may still works on GNOME but not on other desktops. In additon, current source code are supposed to be built against Bazel but gyp files are quite out-dated. Thus, it is quite difficult to keep maintaining mozc as official package unless we have Bazel packaged.
Thanks everyone. I'm going to close this. It sounds like mozc is probably a bad dependency, but feel free to reopen if somebody manages to package the latest version.
Metadata Update from @catanzaro: - Issue close_status updated to: Won't fix - Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)
Log in to comment on this ticket.