Users not warned about switch to fcitx and no instructions are given

> There is a significant change to behavior with the change to fcitx from ibus.

Hi, could you please elaborate on what happened with your update? That update doesn't switch your selected input method framework from ibus to fcitx. Also, the update should have been an effective no-op if Fcitx wasn't already installed in the first place...

Thanks for your quick response.

I was running Vivid on 2 laptops. I did a dist-upgrade on each of them and had the experience described above on both laptops.

Additional details:

1. ibus and ibus-pinyin were installed during system installation as normal.

2. I added and then removed ibus-pinyin as an input method (on on computer, but not the other).

3. But I had not yet installed the additional ibus packages that I normally use, such is ibus-libpinyin, ibus-anthy, etc. on either computer.

4. The dist-upgrade contained the packages in the attached list, including fcitx (etc) as an automatic install and the new version of indicator-keyboard.

5. I added ibus-libpinyin, but could not add the method. After a little investigation I saw that fcitx was now the default IM. I assumed this was by design and added fcitx-libpinyin, etc.

6. I noticed an immediate change in the topbar input icon.

Please let me know if there's anything I can add.

Thanks Eric,

The bug seems to be that the fcitx packages (particularly fcitx-bin) were pulled in somehow, but it isn't clear to me why this happened. Nothing has a hard depends on it, and trying to apt-get purge it doesn't remove anything suspicious (like indicator-keyboard, unity-settings-daemon, or unity-control-center).

Can you please try to do an apt-get purge of fcitx-bin? Please note any non-related fcitx packages that are removed as a consequence of that (if something particularly important like unity-settings-daemon or unity-control-center are removed, just abort).

I've already removed all fcitx packages except fcitx-data, libfcitx-config4, libfcitx-glient0, libfcitx-utils0 (all required by Unity Control Center, as you know) and reset the system IM back to Ibus; so I'm back to normal.

I didn't really question the fcitx packages in the upgrade since it's now supported and it seemed reasonable to have it readily available.

I assumed the bug was with indicator-keyboard because that's where problem showed itself in a big way, but based on your earlier comment I wonder if the bug isn't in unity-settings-daemon and how the current IM is detected.

I have a third laptop that I had not yet upgraded. This time I added in ibus-libpinyin IM *before* doing the upgrade. This time fcitx was added to the startup programs and set itself in update-alternatives for xinput.d, but it did not replace Ibus as the system-wide IM in Language Support as it had before. The topbar had both indicators. When I switched the system-wide IM to fcitx and then set it back to Ibus (restarting each time), the ibus-libpinyin IM had been removed from Text Entry.

So apart from the question of the fcitx packages showing up in the upgrade, it seems like various config scripts are not correctly detecting Ibus.

If I can do any additional debugging, please let me know.

I did a fresh install, then manually upgraded packages in the dist-upgrade one by one to isolate the ones pulling in fcitx.

indicator-keyboard did not pull in fcitx. It was unity-control-center and unity-settings-daemon that are each trying to pull in the fcitx packages.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

indicator-keyboard have a hard dependencie on libfcitx-gclient0

so fcitx can't be fully purged if the user does not care about it
myself i purge lot of things (if possible) to get rid of a bunch of packages i does not need. So hard dependencies are a nightmare.

This bug was fixed in the package unity-settings-daemon - 15.04.1+15.04.20150313-0ubuntu1

---------------
unity-settings-daemon (15.04.1+15.04.20150313-0ubuntu1) vivid; urgency=medium

  [ William Hua ]
  * Remove fcitx-data from Recommends and check if the required file,
    config.desc, is available at runtime. Trying to dist-upgrade
    currently pulls in the fcitx-bin which is higher priority than ibus.
    (LP: #1430971)
 -- CI Train Bot <email address hidden> Fri, 13 Mar 2015 12:54:01 +0000

This bug was fixed in the package unity-control-center - 15.04.0+15.04.20150313-0ubuntu1

---------------
unity-control-center (15.04.0+15.04.20150313-0ubuntu1) vivid; urgency=medium

  [ William Hua ]
  * Remove fcitx-data from Recommends and check if the required file,
    config.desc, is available at runtime. Trying to dist-upgrade
    currently pulls in the fcitx-bin which is higher priority than ibus.
    (LP: #1430971)
 -- CI Train Bot <email address hidden> Fri, 13 Mar 2015 12:53:31 +0000