[xkbcommon] How to distinguish left-shift and right-shift

[Ran Benita]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 04:00:15PM -0300, Wander Lairson Costa wrote:
> 2013/9/26 Ran Benita <ran234 at gmail.com>:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> >
> > The information you need, if you want to use the key-down approach
> > (which is the only one I can think of), is whether e.g. the Left Shift
> > key is down at any given moment. This keys-state information is kept on
> > the compositor, but now you need to reconstruct it on the client. The
> > way to do it is as I outlined above, i.e. wl_keyboard.enter event, which
> > gives you a wl_array of all the keys which are pressed +
> > wl_keyboard.key events, which allow you to keep this array in sync.
> >
> 
> This is what I was thinking about.
> 
> > (Though by a quick look at the Weston code, it might be that it sends
> > key-down events for all the keys which are down when the focus is
> > changed, that is, it replays what happened to get to the current state.
> > So maybe you don't need the information in the wl_keyboard.enter after
> > all, only the key events with an initial empty array. It should be easy
> > to check which way is it).
> >
> 
> But this is an weston implementation detail, I guess, other
> compositors may not have the same behavior.

Good point, I can't find it specified either. I think whatever the
current behavior is, it should be specified in wayland.xml, so people can
rely on it. In some cases, such "undefined behavior" can be a real
hinderance, for example if you want to keep a 'press-count' for a key
(there can be cases like two keyboards in the same seat, so *two* Left
Shift keys can be down at the same time, etc). And since Wayland will
have many compositors, you don't have a de facto standard like X server,
and they *will* do it differently, I expect...

So if you see what happens exactly, it'd be nice if you open a bug, or
post back, or send a patch :)

Ran