[kmscon-devel] [PATCH 1/2] uxkb: allow the user to use a predefined keymap file

[David Herrmann]

Hi Ran

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 7:22 PM, Ran Benita <ran234 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 06:03:09PM +0100, David Herrmann wrote:
>> Hi Ran
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Ran Benita <ran234 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > This adds an --xkb-keymap <FILE> option to kmscon. When given, kmscon
>> > will try to compile the keymap from the file before trying the other
>> > options (like the XkbKeymap option in xorg.conf).
>> >
>> > This is useful for users who have a customized XKB keymap, which is
>> > usually kept in a single file. Example, in X:
>> >         xkbcomp $DISPLAY my_keymap.xkb
>> > Customize my_keymap.xkb to your liking, and then in .xinitrc, or
>> > xorg.conf:
>> >         xkbcomp my_keymap.xkb $DISPLAY
>> > Now you can also do this in kmscon.conf.
>> >
>> > Additionally, lacking such an option, kmscon is quite difficult to use
>> > without an installed xkeyboard-config package, which provides the
>> > infrastructure for the "rules" configuration mechanism. We might even
>> > want to distribute some plain xkb file as a last ditch, for
>> > robustness, if even the default RMLVO fails... without a keyboard a
>> > terminal is not very useful.
>> >
>> > Signed-off-by: Ran Benita <ran234 at gmail.com>
>>
>> I changed it to use *_from_string() so we don't do file-handling magic
>> inside of libuterm. The caller should handle file paths so they can
>> support --rootdir options or similar.
>>
>> Other than that I didn't change anything and pushed it upstream. Thanks!
>> (I just noticed I lost your signed-off-by somewhere, whoops, but I
>> don't require them, anyway)
>>
>> I tested it with basic.xkb from libxkbcommon and it works for me. If
>> you can point me to a very basic us-keyboard layout, I would write up
>> a patch that includes it as fallback in uterm.
>
> Great, thanks. (I'm not completely sure where to point my git remote
> now..).

Yeah, sorry, freedesktop.org was unavailable for some days so I used
github again.
I mainly use ~dvdhrm/kmscon.git on freedesktop.org, but github is
still fine. In fact, github may be more up-to-date as fdo is often
unavailable.

But I prefer most communication to be done via the mailing-list. It's
the simplest way to comment on patches.

> Attached a basic standalone keymap, which is exactly equivalent to
> current xkeyboard-config default, but trimmed down. It can be cut down
> further if want to drop some useless keycodes etc. Whitespace is not
> significant so you can minify it if you want.

I want to avoid making it unreadable so the only choice would be
removing whitespaces via a script. However, there are some important
spaces that I shouldn't remove (like after "virtual_modifiers").
Hence, I think I will leave it as it is. It's only like 17kb and can
be swapped out by the kernel just fine.

Thanks a lot! I will try to get that built-in.
David