[Xcb] Your GSOC proposal: "Complete input support for XCB"

[Arnaud Fontaine]

Hi,

    > Hi,  thank you for your fast  replies & sorry for  the double post
    >  yesterday!   I  read  the  stuff concerning  the  Xlib  functions
    > yesterday evening (and in fact, I "c/p" the Xlib keyboard stuff to
    > XCB a few  years ago when we needed keyboard input  in a small and
    > never finished  project) - but: Is it  really "worthwhile" to port
    > the old  Xlib bindings to XCB (AFAIR it  does not support changing
    >  the keyboard  layout  on-the-fly  and only  a  limited number  of
    > keyboard  layouts anyway? And  now I think  about it there  were a
    > number of further limitations  with the Xlib stuff itself, perhaps
    > I find the code somewhere around.).

Well,  I do  think it's  worthwhile because  for instance  Xlib provides
functions to convert a KeySym to a String (such as UTF-8 and UTF-32) and
vice  versa, which is  not provided  by XKB  of course  as it's  not its
purpose (I  think the Wikipedia  page about XKB[0] gives  an interesting
and brief overview of XKB). Besides  of that, the Xlib part about groups
and  modifiers (e.g.   the section  "Keyboards" (5)  in X  Window System
Protocol)  is already  implemented in  xcb-util/keysyms (the  appendix A
about "KEYSYM Encoding" is missing though).

Also, XKB "is  supposed" to be replaced by something  else at some point
so that could be interesting to try to port similar extensions (maybe it
could help to read Mariusz's proposal of last year?). Hope that helps.

Arnaud

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_keyboard_extension