Moving kimpanel to plasma-desktop

[Eike Hein]

Hi,

kimpanel is our frontend to IMEs such as ibus and fcitx. It (or an
equivalent) are necessary to successfully input a number of writing
systems in use across the world.

kimpanel is currently shipped as part of kdeplasma-addons. I think
that's broken and it needs to be part of the core Plasma Desktop
product - typing text in your language is a pretty basic thing.

I'd like us to do the following in the near future (i.e. for 5.6):

a) Move it from kdeplasma-addons to plasma-desktop. This adds
   optional build dependencies on the libraries that kimpanel
   supports as backends to plasma-desktop - ibus and fcitx. The
   maintainer (Weng Xuetian aka csslayer on #plasma) is on board
   with this.

b) Improve it where necessary - let's all have a look at the code
   with our Plasma hats on. It's not in bad shape though.

c) Improve the desktop init js to auto-add kimpanel to the default
   panel depending on locale. In prep for this we already exposed
   the locale on the scripting interface in 5.4, but we don't use
   it in the script yet. This means adding a whitelist of locales
   to the script and maintaing it; I'd initially base it on the
   list of locales Fedora uses to make the call on installing ibus
   by default.


Longer-term I want us to:

d) Merge kimpanel and the keyboard layout indicator.

e) Make it easier to add input languages (this is more than just
a keyboard layout) from System Settings and auto-add kimpanel to
the panel when needed: This is the level our proprietary competi-
tion has been at for a long time, and we need to catch up.

f) Investigate global emoji input via the IME stack.


The overall goal here is to make sure basic keyboard usability
is always-available to a wider audience than before and doesn't
require a sysadmin degree to achieve. You shouldn't have to know
that you need kdeplasma-addons or ibus to be able to set up and
type in your lang. We fail this hard right now, let's do better!



Cheers,
Eike