What's wrong with xkbcomp?

[Daniel Stone]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 09:35:12PM +0100, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
> An issue that is often discussed is the xkbcomp utility, that parses
> the xkeyboard-config configuration files
> and produces a binary XKM file that X.Org can read and take the
> keyboard layout settings from there.
> 
> Apparently, xkbcomp has performance issues when running on small devices.
> On modern computers, xkbcomp is very fast. In the process of
> diagnosing where the problem is,
> I would like to ask for a sample of command-line options
> that are used when you try to run xkbcomp on a small device.
> 
> So, what parameters do you give to xkbcomp when you invoke it on these
> small devices?

setxkbmap -print | xkbcomp -xkb - foo.txt 2>/dev/null still takes 0.1sec
on my laptop, with a completely warm cache.  With a cold cache, it takes
around 1.3sec.  Given that we currently run this twice on startup, that's
1.4sec just compiling keymaps.  Ugh.

Plus, why do we fork an external program, feed it a text description of
five strings which is then fully lexed, have that generate an
XkbDescRec, serialise the XkbDescRec to a binary format (losing
information in the process) somewhere in the filesystem, read that and
then deserialise to ... an XkbDescRec?

Cheers,
Daniel
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