xkb and xinput

[Owen Taylor]

On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 05:17, elylevy-xserver@cs.huji.ac.il wrote:
> hey,
> I saw a lot of discussion about xkb and xinput on the channel latly,
> I wonder what was the conclution in the end.
> does program use xkb for more than the autorepeat? or can we like keithp
> said just add the auto repeat to xfixes and get rid of xkb all together?
> if we do that should we write some client that would provide simple xkb
> facutionality (easy layout switching using special keys on the keyboard
> and so on).

GTK+ uses XKB *extensively*. Along with autorepeat, it uses it
to, e.g.:

 - Properly handle accelerators on multi-group keyboards (Alt-F works
   when the keyboards is in Russian mode)
 - Detect changing between left-to-right and right-to-left keyboards

Basically, the core X server keyboard model is not sufficient to
represent many keyboards out there.

It's unfortunate that the XKB spec is vastly overcomplicated; the
worst offender here is all the machinery to allow xmodmap to still
apparently work when using XKB keyboards. But ditching it would make
life much worse for users of scripts such as Russian, Greek, Hebrew,
etc. 

And I don't see any value in creating a new specification that is
XKB-lite; we have toolkit integration for XKB; we have some pretty
nice keyboard configuration tools based on XKB; we have working
code for XKB.

Regads,
					Owen