[Bf-committers] Input Method Editor Patch (D765)

[Julian Eisel]

Hey all,
 
It's time to make a decision on how to proceed with the Input Method Editor patch (D765) by Dun Liang (randon) on which I was assigned to as main reviewer.
To tell you right away: I wouldn't suggest a merge at the current state of the patch. The patch has never been finished, as randon didn't had the time to do so. I was aware of that from day one of the review process, so plan was to finish it during the review. I managed to implement most of the open todos, but more and more new ones appeared on the road. As proposed in the last meeting, we could ignore some of the minor ones (mainly code wise) in favor of our Asian community, but I'm mainly worried about some glitches of the patch, that may not be visible at a first glance, but that do exist (crashes, Text Editor and Console sharing IME input, broken cursor drawing while text editing, ...), making the IME implementation pretty unstable or even useless in some cases. These glitches were already existent in the original patch and were not produced during review. Also support for text objects is only partly finished (my plan was to leave this out for the initial merge). So to put it in a nutshell: There is still quite a lot work needed until the patch is acceptable (IMHO).
It looks like we have a few options now:
 * Accept the patch and consider it as a WIP (editing with disabled IME seems to work fine - no potential bugs found so far)
 * Only merge IME support for Text Buttons (quite stable) and postpone the rest for 2.74 (support for Console, Text Editor, text objects)
 * Postpone entire merge for 2.74 (we/I could still provide regulary updated builds until that happens)


My appologizes that this comes up so late, I should've realized this earlier, but until yesterday, I thought it would be possible to fix the glitches in time. The thing is, some of them appeared just the last two days.

I'd also like to mention, that I don't want to blame randon here, who already did an impressive job on this! I would be happy if you were able to continue the work on the patch, you can count on my support. I can do it if not, as I really see the importance of this for our Asian friends.


A bit frustrated but still optimistic
- Julian (Severin) -

P.S.: Thanks to the - as I heard almost 50 - people from the Asian community who tested the patch and gave feedback, especially to Xueke Pei and Tamito Kajiyama! I really appreciate every user feedback!