Switch Phosh from Squeekboard to phosh-osk-stub
Background
Squeekboard is effectively unmaintained. The latest non-translation (translation as in text strings, not keyboard layout) commit was on 1 April 2023, which almost was a year ago (https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/squeekboard/-/commit/1fac218c7077e5c42882330a7f6ddd6d63f2690f). This is not the case that Squeekboard is "done" and that further maintenance is not necessary — for example, text prediction has been requested for long but not been implemented. It also lacks most emoji, scales poorly on many devices, and is using GTK 3 with no progress towards moving it to GTK 4 as far as I can tell. While it hypothetically would be possible to further maintain Squeekboard, it makes heavy use of C <-> Rust interop which results in a high barrier to entry for new contributors as it requires expertise both in C and Rust. The maintainer has also neither merged nor reviewed recent merge requests.
Consequently, it seems like switching Phosh to phosh-osk-stub is the right way to go as it fixes many of the long-standing bugs with Squeekboard and is actively maintained. Guido Günther has given me the green light to do this.
TODO (contributions welcome)
-
Move phosh-osk-stub to community (https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/merge_requests/61355) -
Make an Edge blog post asking people to test phosh-osk-stub on their devices -
Figure out how to switch the packaging from Squeekboard to phosh-osk-stub (ideally we want to switch existing installs as well)
Feel free to post comments in this issue about regressions you find when switching from Squeekboard to phosh-osk-stub.