SVU's blog

xkeyboard-config 1.3

New release was uploaded and announced last night. Despite the hassle with the ssh keys, I made it in time (ok, 30 mins after midnight).

The highlights of the release:

• A lot of information about countries and languages, in a form of ISO codes. Users of unstable GNOME 2.23.x are highly encouraged to try new xk-c and keyboard-configuration applet. I would love to see bugreports about errors in that information (missing/wrong codes). In theory, every layout/variant should be accessible at least 2 ways – per-country and per-language (well, some variants are multilingual and multinational).
• Dropped sun/sgi rulesets. I do not foresee many complains – but if someone is still using them, please come to me and we’ll discuss the upgrade path.
• For Russians: all your base are belong to us howtows regarding specifying “winkeys” variant are now practically obsolete. The default variant is winkeys now – because most of the people are using it (I suspected that for quite a while, voting on linux.org.ru confirmed it).
• For Romanians: the default variant was changed (see this bug if you’re interested in rather hot discussion around that). Now it is “commabelow” (earlier it was “cedillabelow”). It might cause some side effects for users of early versions of Windows – but it is the right thing to do.

Enjoy! And please remember – some open issues with xkeyboard-config still require resolution on xkbcomp/xserver level.

PS It is great to see Nokia hiring people for maemo. I wish I lived in Helsinki – a couple of hundred kilometers from the best city of the world (if you happen not to know yet, it is St. Petersburg, Russia). But for a “family man” mobility is the word in the past tense 🙁 BTW, I am always available for remote open source work offers…

Release in danger

According to the schedule, the next release of xkeyboard-config has to be made tomorrow. It seems I won’t make it – I still do not have access to CVS (because of the story with the keys in Debian). Sure I filed a bug for site wranglers – but God knows how long it will take to deal with it…

My apologies for the possible delay and all inconvenience it may cause.

So long and thanks for all the fish

There is a lot of legacy, practically unmaintained stuff in xkeyboard-config. I am trying to be very conservative regarding dropping it – there are people using old hardware, you know… The time has come for the sun-specific and sgi-specific rules. They are very old, Sun people do not use them. So, the files rules/sun* and rules/sgi* are gone now in CVS – and they will be missing in the next release (due in May). The layouts and keymaps are still there – that code is too precious to be dropped earlier than … anyway, not today.

GSoC; OLPC

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…

Languages, countries

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.

gswitchit-plugins, GSoC 2008

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!

“XKB suxx” (c)

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.

Talks, ideas…

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.

xkeyboard-config 1.1: (nearly) failed release

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.

XKeyboardConfig release schedule + freeze for 1.1

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.