[PATCH libxkbcommon 1/2] makekeys: add all symbols converted to lower-case

Bill Spitzak spitzak at gmail.com
Mon Oct 1 12:11:17 PDT 2012


I think you are asking for trouble here.

The biggest problem I see is that you are calling tolower() which 
changes depending on the locale. Though most software fixes this by 
forcing the locale to C, I'm not sure if that is acceptable for xkb. 
Please do not rely on anything more complicated that ASCII-only 
to-lower. Unicode tolower is extremely complex and changes over time. 
ISO-8859-1 tolower will require you to assume the text is either UTF-8 
or not UTF-8, both are bad assumptions.

Also if the calling code adds "Foo" and makes it point to A, then 
decides to replace it with a pointer to B, the "foo" entry will still 
point to A. Probably not what is wanted.

Case independence is a bad idea all around for lookup in tables.

Also not clear why users would type in any of these strings, rather than 
click on pre-defined strings, which can have the right case.

David Herrmann wrote:
> xkb_keysym_from_name() uses a big lookup table generated by "makekeys"
> to find keysyms. It does this case-sensitive because we have keys like
> XKB_KEY_A and XKB_KEY_a. So if a user searches for "a" we must always
> return the case-sensitive match, which is XKB_KEY_a.
> However, lets look at XKB_KEY_XF86HomePage. The user currently _must_
> enter "XF86HomePage" correctly to get this keysym.


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