libxklavier was originally hosted in CVS on sourceforge.net. At some point, it was moved to CVS hosted on freedesktop.org.
CVS is out of fashion for quite a while – but I did not see any reason to switch to git (standard de-facto for freedesktop.org). Now, I made the move. Here it is: git+ssh://git.freedesktop.org/git/libxklavier. All future changes are going to be made in git. I just made last commit to CVS. So long, old friend!
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.
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 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.