some q's (everything & build & keyboard) [was: Re: Xorg 7.2 RC2]

[Dan Nicholson]

On 11/19/06, Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 19, 2006 at 07:25:48PM +0100, Jens Stroebel wrote:
>
> > in the http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/development/X11R7.2-RC2/
> > directory, xkbdata is still part of the release and
> >       build-from-tarballs.sh
> > still builds/installs it...
>
> ajax, can we deprecate this immediately?
>
> > Has anyone experienced similar problems regarding
> > behaviour of the keyboard? Are xkbdata/xkbdesc needed both,
> > or if not so, which one?
>
> xkbdesc is required, but be sure it installs under
> $(prefix)/share/X11/xkb.

I'd been meaning to ask a couple questions/make a couple comments
about this for a while. I cc'd Sergey Udaltsov since he seems to be
the main developer.

First and foremost, it's difficult to find out about xkbdesc if you
don't already know about it. On this list it is commonly referred to
as xkbdesc, which is the CVS module name. But it's also known as
xkeyboard-config, and that's the bugzilla name. If you google one or
the other, it's not at all apparent that they're related. Looking at
the xkeyboard-config wiki page, the only time xkbdesc shows up is in
the CVS checkout command:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fXKeyboardConfig

Second, it doesn't make a lot of sense why the module is in the xlibs
CVS repository. Everything else except this lone project is long gone.
It also makes it seem that it's not the same kind of project as
xkbdata. Is it a library? Is it data? To that end, it would be really
nice if the project could be moved to git with the rest of the X
modules, but that's a separate story.

Not trying to be pushy, but the current setup is not that clear.
Particularly the interchanging of names. This makes it difficult for
ordinary users (not distros, who'd already know) to migrate away from
xkbdata.

--
Dan