xkb issue - types not recognized

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 1:26 PM, cheater00 . <cheater00 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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!

When you say "using the layout this way", what do you mean? I was
talking about editing files in ~/.local/share.

>
>> 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!

That was the x11 development channel on Freenode.

J. Leclanche