AllowEmptyInput and HAL (SOLVED!!!)

[Phil Endecott]

Finally solved, after something like 60 hours of hacking.

My libX11.so was old.  This caused xkbcomp to fail to parse the keymap 
files - it didn't recognise ISO_Level5 stuff.  It looks like xkbcomp 
generated a keymap with some sort of Any+Any definition that caused 
every key to toggle the modifiers.

This morning I attempted to purge and re-install all of my X-related 
Debian packages.  I got rid of the server stuff but I couldn't get rid 
of the client libraries because that would cause huge numbers of client 
programs to be removed too.  But I didn't worry about that because the 
problem was "clearly" on the server side.  I eventually latched on to 
the "level 5" warnings and started looking for them with strings.  Then 
ldd on xkbcomp pointed at the guilty library.

I'm surprised that it didn't work with the xserver that I built using 
khbuild.  Presumably this is because that was still using libraries 
from /usr/lib, not the ones that it had just built and put somewhere in 
$HOME.  Is that an rpath issue with khbuild?

What can we learn?

- Debian needs a more strongly-versioned dependency between some of its 
packages.  I'll take that up with them (if the appropriate people are 
already reading this, please let me know).

- xkbcomp, when called by the server, claims that "xkbcomp errors are 
not fatal to the server".  And only some of its messages appear in the 
X log file.  I feel that this particular error should be considered 
fatal.  And ideally, the consequence of an unrecognised keysym should 
not be the Any Key effect that I got.  (Is the person responsible for 
xkbcomp reading this?).


Thanks to those of you who helped with suggestions.


Regards,

Phil.