[desktop-discuss] Future of keyboard-layout - libxklavier - gswitchit applet

[Brian Cameron]

Some of you may have noticed that we are no longer building
libxklavier in our GNOME 2.16 builds.  We decided to remove it
because libxklavier depends on a private feature of the XKB
extension that only works with the Xorg server, and causes users
problems especially if X server and client are running different
Xservers (e.g. Xsun/Xorg) or even different versions of the
same Xserver.  Refer here for details about this problem:

    http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152105

If any users wish to continue using these features, I'd
recommend creating a jds-spec-files-extra spec-file for
building SUNWlibxklavier, and then you will need to
rebuild SUNWgnome-desktop-prefs and SUNWgnome-applets
with libxklavier turned on (note you will need to modify
the call to configure in the spec file to --enable-xklavier
instead of --disable-xklavier) when you rebuild.

I just finished talking with Sergev V. Udaltsov, the
maintainer of libxklavier, and he points out that libxklavier
supports two backends.  One uses the private XKB interface
and the fallback backend manages xmodmap files to try and
simulate the features of using the Xkb backend.  Sergev
points out that this solution probably has the same issues
since xmodmap is bound to the keyboard driver in X, which
may not be the same in different Xservers (remember XKB was
implemented to make things like this independent of the
X server).  But Sergev suggests it might be worth exploring
to see if the xmodmap backend works better.  If people were
interested in exploring this, and if we were to find that
it does work without the issues the Xkb backend has, then
we might consider putting libxklavier back in with this
alternative backend.

The long-term solution is that Sergev is working with the
XKB maintainers to hopefully get the needed interfaces
placed there so it can work in a way that works with all
Xservers.  Hopefully this will gain momentum so we can
put this useful feature back into JDS at some future
date.

Just letting you know so that if you are interested you
can get involved.  The #xkbconfig IRC channel at FreeNode.net
is a good forum to discuss issues relating to libxklavier.

Brian