[Xcb] [RFC PATCH proto] XKB-fixes (preliminary version)

[Christian Linhart]

Hi Ran,

Thank you for scanning through the changes and for your
suggestions for continuing with that work.
I think that your suggestions are good, so I continue as you have suggested.

I will split up the patch when I have time. Probably next weekend.

I'll first post those patches that probably don't require further work,
to reduce the quantity of changes later, as you have suggested.

Then I'll change the unions to switch-case and post them, too.

Then I'll do the generator stuff that's still needed.

etc...

***

Thank you for noticing potential usability problems of the generated code.
I can imagine that we may have some problem here because XKB has one
of the most complex requests of X11, so this may not have been addressed properly yet.
Maybe this stuff will improve when I'll change the unions to switch-case, but I am not sure.

If we need to change the generator for improving usability of the API,
we also have to be careful with ABI and API compatibility issues.
So, if we need to make a new xml file, then we should wait
until we'll have clarified the usage issues.
Otherwise, we'll end up with a whole series of new xml files. ;-)

In any case, I think that we should provide an example for how to use the complex requests
and put that on the wiki or in a new "doc" or "examples" directory in libxcb.

Chris


On 03/21/15 10:00, Ran Benita wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 11:44:01AM +0100, Christian Linhart wrote:
>> This is an informal patch ( not to be merged ) to show
>> what I have found in XKB.
> Ugh, for some reason this went to my spam folder so I almost missed it.
>
> I scanned through the changes, they all seem to make sense to me. That's
> very in-depth work!
>
> I'll wait for the split-up patches to review for correctness and
> compatability. At worst, we'll indeed just have to create some new xml
> file.
>
>> Among other things, the following probably needs to be done:
>> * some changes in the generator
>>   - support structs with only varsized fields
>>     Currently, this generates an empty C-struct.
>>     I have once made a patch for that, but I need to adapt it to
>>     current upstream.
>>
>>   - Maybe support size of var-sized unions.
>>     Or better: we replace the unions by switch-case, see further below.
>>     Var-sized unions are hard because there is no
>>     definition which union field to choose.
>>     (just possibly heuristics but that's ugly)
>>
>>   - ...
>>
>> * event numbers work differently in XKB than in other extensios.
>>   This should be reflected by the XML.
>>
>> * replace unions by switch-case. Especially Doodad.
>>   Unions are deprecated and they do not fully describe the protocol
>>   because there is no info in the XML which union field to choose.
>>   We need switch-case anyways for replacing unions with var-sized members.
>>
>> * testing
>>   (I have only tested with my own generator, not with libxcb)
>>
>> * review against the spec and xlib/xserver implementation.
>>
>> * review ABI/API compatibility with respect to usage in
>>   important software like QT.
>>   Then decide whether to make a second version of XKB support.
> This all sounds like a good plan. I have a small suggestion: don't wait
> until you get all of these things right before you send all of the
> patches. Below you have many small correctness fixes (e.g. alignments)
> and improvements (e.g. using the right enum mask) which I think you can
> send out already. That will reduce the amount of changes you need to
> handle, and we can also help with double-checking against the spec, etc.
>
>> * ...
> I have run into one more problem with the generated API itself, which
> renders requests like xkb_set_map_aux() impossible to use in practice.
> The problem is that there is no way (I think) to generate the last
> argument `const xcb_xkb_set_map_values_t *values`. But, it'll be better
> to discuss that in a separate bug so I'll do that.
>
> Ran
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