Please consider not enabling viqr by default for Vietnamese locales
Debian and Ubuntu have had a patch in their GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3 packages since 2008, making the imviqr
module no longer used by default in Vietnamese locales. I recently did some research on why we had this patch, which it seems was originally added for https://launchpad.net/bugs/191451.
In the Vietnamese Quoted-Readable input method, punctuation following a base letter is converted into diacritical marks, for example a(
→ ă
. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_Quoted-Readable.) A 2008 bug report in Ubuntu argued that this is a problematic default, particularly when typing passwords, where the effect of the punctuation is non-obvious.
According to the bug reporter, VIQR is popular with Vietnamese users living elsewhere in the world, where Vietnamese keyboards are unlikely to be readily available, but is not a popular choice within Vietnam, where the Telex or VNI input modes are preferred.
When I asked the debian-l10n-vietnamese mailing list, the feedback I received was that VIQR should continue to be available, but should not be the default for any locale. I'll point members of that list to this issue report.