[xkb] Re: xkeyboard-config and modular release

[Danilo Segan]

Hi Alan,

Today at 5:19, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
>> Tonight there was discussion on IRC regarding the integration process
>> for xkeyboard-config. Talking about the porting to the monolythic
>> tree, some points were mentioned:
>> 1. New dependency in the build process - intltool
>
> Which in turn brings in it's own dependencies, since last I checked,
> intltool was incompatible with non-GNU versions of xgettext.

Really? What do you have in mind?  intltool does support some features
found only in GNU gettext (such as setting input encoding), but you
don't have to use them.  If there are any other requirements, we'd be
glad to work on fixing them, but we'd first need to learn about them.

>> 3. Full compatibility with the current X.Org code (server, xkbcomp, setxkbmap)
>
> How many users will be broken?   Why is it a good idea to break
> compatibility?   Why is it not a better idea to simply continue
> to ship the working files we have and not break things for our users?

Because those "working files" are unmaintained and contain a plethora
of bugs?  If there's anyone who's willing to work to backport all the
fixes from xkeyboard-config, that might seem viable, but unless not
(and I suspect there isn't anyone), users probably want better
layouts.

OTOH, xkeyboard-config might be installed similarly to what Ivan did
with "multi-layout" XKB files in XFree86 4.3.0 by putting them in "pc"
subdirectory of /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/.  Something like this would make
xkeyboard-config parallel-installable with whatever you've got on your
system already.

However, all the sufficiently modern tools read xorg.lst or xorg.xml
to get list of available layouts (or xfree86.lst/xfree86.xml), and
these are even better with xkeyboard-config (they are translated, more
complete, etc.).

Cheers,
Danilo