xkbcomp initialisation messing up with GNOME keyboard layouts?

[Peter Hutterer]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 10:08:58AM -0400, David Huggins-Daines wrote:
>> the correct solution here is to let gnome set the keyboard settings on each
>> physical device they apply to.
>>   
> And this makes perfect sense to me as the source of the problem, so I'd  
> like to try to see if I can find a solution to it.  So, the question I  
> have is - how can we set the XKB layout on each physical device?  Does  
> XKB support multiple keyboards now?

> It seems that in libxklavier (which is the GNOME component responsible  
> for managing XKB layouts and things), there is a handler for the  
> XkbNewKeyboardNotify event, and this would be the correct place to set  
> the XKB layout for each device.
>
> Does this sound correct to you, and if so, how do we set the XKB layout  
> (which is accomplished by running xkbcomp to a tempfile, then loading  
> that tempfile with libxkbfile, then calling XkbWriteToServer() to send  
> the settings to the server ... ugh) on specific keyboard devices?
>

AFAIK, the xkb protocol requests allow for a device ID. From a quick check,
Xlib doesn't seem to always expose it so your job could be ... interesting.

xkbcomp supports a device argument too, so maybe peeking at the source may
help to find what requests you need.

Cheers,
  Peter