GSoC proposal

[Cheer Xiao]

2012/3/25 Aric Stewart <aric at 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

-- 
Regards,
Cheer Xiao aka. xiaq