weston and hardware keyboard

[Kristian Høgsberg]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 4:15 AM, Marc Chalain <marc.chalain at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> linux/input.h gives numbers of key definitions. The keymap is only useful
> for PC keyboard when only the layout change from one country to an other. On
> device we have : on/off, softkey1, softkey2, 12 keys for the keypad in some
> cases, home, back... The key codes are hard coded inside the kernel. When we
> add a keymap, we add codes, and time of treatment, and remove resources. On
> some devices we have only 128Mb of RAM, we can keep a big table in memory
> just to change KEY_LEFT to XKB_KEY_Left.
> An other reason to disabling the keymap it's for sillicium founder. They
> have to provide the backend for the GPU. They have not enough time to manage
> a complete keyboard that the customer will change immediately. When we build
> a BSP for a new board, we have to build the minimum of softwares, like that
> we can develop with the most recent version of the kernel or the graphic
> libraries.
> Regards,
> Marc.

It sounds like a valid use case to me.  I always intended for wayland
to be useful without the full complexity of XKB, if you're not
supporting pc-style, international keyboards.  So for a device with a
small key panel, a set-top box, a car dash board etc, I think not
using xkb is perfectly fine.  However as soon as there's a usb port
and you support plugging in real keyboards, XKB is a requirement.

Some of the confusion in the past that Daniel is more about mixing up
XKB and core X keyboard semantics.  In case of wayland we have a
pretty clear distinction - either you deal with keycodes (as per
linux/input.h) only and don't support pc-style keyboards, of you pull
in xkbcommon and can then translate key codes to keysyms.

Kristian

>
>
> 2013/6/18 Michael Hasselmann <michaelh at openismus.com>
>>
>> On Mon, 2013-06-17 at 18:08 +0200, Marc Chalain wrote:
>> > Hello,
>>
>>
>> > My first observation is we need a PC keyboard support at the end
>> > ( often a virtual keyboard).
>>
>> There's an input method procotol that we intended to use for virtual
>> keyboards. Try weston's clients/editor.c together with the example
>> keyboard. You can plug in your own by changing [input-method] in
>> weston.ini for instance.
>>
>> Sending key events should be the exception when using a virtual
>> keyboard. Instead, we rely on input method events to input text. But
>> even then clients will have to parse those rare key events.
>>
>> ciao Michael
>>
>>
>
>
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