[SCIM] Issues of multi user server

[James Su]

Hi,
  Thank you very much for your idea. I have similar opinion as yours. 
But I also have the following concern:
1) A totally library based input method may get very large memory 
overhead in some situation. For example, if I wrote a library based 
gtkimmodule, then each gtk application using this immodule will start an 
instance of the im library and hold a copy of input method data. Some 
chinese input methods have very large amount of data, maybe more than 
one megabytes. So in this situation, it's better to have a single daemon 
which holds only one copy of data and all im clients get data from this 
daemon.
2) System wide input method daemon has many issues just like what you 
said. But currently I'm just considering if we can use per user daemon. 
The only issue to use per user daemon is how can we start (and just one) 
im daemon when a user first login to the system and stop the daemon when 
there is no login session available for this user.

  SCIM can work as a per user daemon with manual control just like what 
I said. User may start a SCIM daemon in their xinit script just before 
starting the XIM server with the following command:

$ scim -f socket -ns socket -c simple -d

  Then user may start a XIM server in the xinit script which uses the 
resource from the upper scim daemon:

$ scim -f x11 -s socket -c socket -d

  And export the GTK_IM_MODULE=scim environment variable to let all gtk 
clients use the input method resource from the first scim daemon directly.

  This method has no security issue, because all communication between 
the daemon and the clients are based on unix socket, and only this user 
can read/write the socket file.

  Then the only issue I must solve is, how to start/stop the per user 
scim daemon when user login/logout the system.

Regards
James Su


yusuke at cherubim.icw.co.jp wrote:

>Hi James,
>
>I saw your consideration about multi user server,
>so I want to tell my opinion as a developer of uim
>(http://uim freedesktop.org) and want to share our
>knowledge and difficulties of Chinese and Japanese
>input methods.
>
>I once wrote this issue here.
>http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/uim/2003-December/000013.html
>
>Though I do not like multi user server, If multi user server
>is better for most of non Japanese (or Chinese) input methods,
>I have to concede them and change or discard my software.
>How do you think about it?
>
>I hope we will realize input method system which
>(1)can handle both Chinese and Japanese efficiently and
>(2)do not incur overhead on other language environment.
>
>Thanks,
>
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