xkb issue - types not recognized

[cheater00 .]

Hi Jerome,

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 1:23 PM, Jerome Leclanche <adys.wh at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think an x11-related list might get you some better answers. However
> as it happens I made my own xkb layout a while ago. The bad news is I
> never quite figured out how to install it as a separate layout, so
> what I do is actually replace symbols/us with my layout.

thanks, I'll post this to xorg and separately xorg-devel. I'm not sure
which one applies.

> I don't think you're supposed to edit anything in X11/xkb/rules

>From what I've read on the internet, some documents recommend adding
an xkb_keymap declaration in keymap/. Those files, if you look at
them, explicitly specify the types (or compats, not sure) that are
being used, so should work. Compiling by hand with xkbcomp should
work, but I don't want to do that, I want the OS to ingest the files
itself, and show them in the Gnome Keyboard Properties (actually I use
MATE, but that's exactly the same).

Then some documents say that was obsoleted by (non-xml) files in
rules/, e.g. rules/evdev and rules/evdev.lst, and then some say that
was obsoleted by xml files in rules/. You can see xkbcomp still
operates with xkb_keymap as the internal format. I assume this should
now be generated from the xml files somehow. This is what Gnome uses
as I understand.

> the package manager ships all the files in there and nothing would survive
> an xkb-common upgrade. To add insult to injury, xkb does not look in
> $XDG_*_HOME dirs so you cannot install your keyboard layout locally.

I have advice to the contrary: I've been using the layout this way -
having edited evdev.xml - for years now and it's worked through all
the package updates I got; not sure if anything updated xkb at all,
probably not. It also survived an upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 to 13.04.
And even if it hadn't - I can always just type sudo ./install.py and
that's it!

> The very unscalable advice I got a few years ago when asking an xkb
> dev was "Just send us your layout and we'll add it upstream". I'm not
> sure if the situation has improved since - if it has, please let me
> know about it :)

Do you remember who that was and where it was? Maybe I could email them.

Thanks!