So, the GUI Editor for XKB layouts is finally approved as GSoC project. I am sure, Simos will not screw it!
Walter Bender leaving OLPC – is a bad news itself. But it is a seriously bad news if it indicates that OLPC leaves true Open Source/Free Software way… That project has been a great promise – and it would be soo sad to see it dying…
For some while, I was being asked why layouts are organized on per country basis. Now, it is time to stop these discussions. I made a large commit to xkeyboard-config, putting loads of ISO (639-2/3166) codes into base.xml.in. So, when next release is out, layouts and variants can be selected by either country or language – whatever is best for the user. Now, I have a request to everyone reading this blog – could you please look at the resulting file and check whether your layouts/variants are listed with proper country/language (please keep in mind – the attributes of a variant are inherited from the enclosing layout, unless explicitly overridden).
The code in libxklavier to support this information is committed (though, some more functions are planned). The gnome-keyboard-properties capplet will benefit of it soon – the code is not in SVN yet, but at least you can look at the screenshot:
The size of the font reflects the number of layouts/variants available for the language.
The latest release of GSwitchIt plugins is using libsoup 2.2. Because of the high demand, I am upgrading it to latest 2.4 (they broke the API slightly, bad boys!). New release is to be made RSN (actually, the code is already is in SVN).
In case if any student is interested in some fame in X Window universe (and bounty from Google or course), there is a couple of XKB-related projects on XOrg page (see Misc section). Feel free to contact me as mentor if you feel like doing it. A lot of fun (and some share of swear words – I’ll teach you some Russian ones, they are very rude) is guaranteed!
In case if your layout switching using 2 Alt keys (default in GNOME) is broken (for example, in the Ubunty Hardy) – there is a good chance xkeyboard-config has nothing to do with it. Most probably, you see consequences of that bug.
“GSwitchIt plugins” did not get much care from me last year. Now, another useful plugin is in the development – allowing user to specify any name for the layout labels in the keyboard indicator. So instead of “USA” and “Ger” you can setup “Bush” and “Merk”, if you like. The idea is inspired by this bug.
Most of the people sure forgotten XFree 4.2 long ago. It was released 18.01.2002 – more than 6 years ago. But libxklavier supported it up to the version 3.4. Now, it is over. Starting from 3.5 (just released) – no more support for that old stuff. Farewell.
As a small present to this new release, libxklavier finally got its own place in the bugzilla world. So, regular users and distromakers are very welcome to use it.
Yesterday, there was a “tarballs due” date for 2.21.4. A day before I realized that wonderful layout printing code (kindly contributed by Ed Catmur, all my gratitude and respect) should be shared – it does not belong to g-c-c but should be generalized in libgnomekbd. So, yesterday night, an hour before the deadline, libgnomekbd 2.21.4.1 was released (there was libgnomekbd 2.21.4 a week ago) – with one new function in API. Now, both g-c-c and g-a in svn depend on libgnomekbd 2.21.4.1 (the last .1 is essential, hehe!). In return, they both offer layout printing functionality, isn’t it nice?
Yesterday night I had two simultaneous chat sessions, both of them were quite interesting and gave me a lot of food for thought.
In jabber, Andriy Rusin and me discussed the idea of the unified DBus interface to the keyboard switching modules in DEs. The draft is published for discussion and announced on xdg and kde-core-devel maillists.
Also, Andriy nearly (hehe:) pushed me to implement the idea I had for a long while – get rid of translations from base.xml (which is getting damn fat these days). So xkeyboard-config would install a set of .gmo files and any interested app/library (read “libxklavier”) would use gettext explicitly. Some minor (intltool?) hacking would be required – the build process should change all underscore-prefixed tags in base.xml.in to the “normal ones” in base.xml, without actually merging translations. Lightweight base.xml would allow me to drop slightly overengineered DBus connection between the indicator widget and g-s-d.
Second session, with Daniel Stone on IRC, pushed another idea I had boiling in my head – introduce cross-element dependencies in base.xml. That way I would be able to say “this layout is only available for that keyboard model”. Or “this option is only available for that layout”. That kind of restrictions could be analyzed by the GUI frontends and prevent “semantically broken” configurations.
The release of xkeyboard-config a couple of days ago would be the smooth one, if only…
Unfortunately, by mistake, the tarbals included broken sl.po, which caused troubles in building base.xml (and subsequent problems in GNOME). I uploaded fixed tarbals several hours later – but apparently some people already downloaded original broken stuff.
I deeply apologize to everyone for inconvenience and potential troubles.
Technical detail: the .po files used by intltools cannot contain <> characters. That breaks resulting XML badly.
TWIMC
In order to a bit of order into the maintenance process, yesterday I published the release schedule of XKeyboardConfig. No more “when” questions from that point, please:)
According to the schedule, the freeze for release 1.1 is starting today.
BTW, how could I remove the page from fd.o wiki? A couple of pages were created by mistake.