Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 16:00:10 EST From: "Kaleb S. KEITHLEY" <kaleb@x.org> To: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> Cc: hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: DVORAK keyboard drivers Message-ID: <199604112000.QAA10915@exalt.x.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 11 Apr 1996 18:15:21 EST. <199604111615.SAA05773@uriah.heep.sax.de>
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> As Kaleb S. KEITHLEY wrote: > > > > > In the mean time, editing your XF86Config file is the solution. > > > > Is that such a difficult concept? > > > > > > Yes. It's unacceptable. > > > > Humbug. You're just being stubborn. > > Thank you for your very enlightening comment. You're close to falling > off the quality level for postings where i even considering an answer. Win some, lose some. > I don't wanna miss Xkb. Otherwise i would have run my Xserver with > -xkb. However, as you probably miss, i have a great deal in Usenet > support, so i can already predict the upcoming questions. > > The current situation for the average user is very simple: the system > worked as exepected before, the key mapping between the base system > and the Xserver were roughly similar (though not identical due to the > design flaws of the underlying interface of the console drivers). It's an education problem and I am sensitive to the difficulties. But no one should expect to upgrade to a new version of anything and not expect to have to understand the implications of doing that. The lack of backwards compatibility in this area is a problem, but to paraphrase Terry Lambert, we can't afford, in this case, to keep the "backwards" in backwards compatibility. On the other hand, if you have a parser that can interpret a keymap to find out what language it's for, then speak up and I'll try to get it into XFree86. (I'm not an XFree86 core team member, so I can't promise anything.) For those who are forced to upgrade XFree86 to get support for their VGA card, if they do things right, they'll run xf86config, and they'll be prompted for the keymap to use. Doesn't seem like a problem to me. > Now, with the technically better solution, this has been broken. It's > *our* responsibility (as the developers of these systems -- o/s, and > X11), to give the users at least a migration tool. They might want to > pick the Xkb tools to go further, but they should to the very least be > able to start with the same feature level as before. I'm living in a > country where 98 % of all users need a different keyboard mapping, > perhaps this is what makes me more sensible to this kind of breakage. > (Yes. Breakage.) Well, if you're going to insist on calling it breakage, then I'll be forced to resort to a little rhetoric of my own: You have to break a few eggs to make a cake. The X Consortium members have voted to move forward. I have no better advice at this time except to be prepared to educate people about how to fix their XF86Config file or how to use xkbcomp to load a keymap in their .xinitrc or .xsession. Otherwise what you're asking for would require a tighter integration between FreeBSD and XFree86 releases, and frankly, I don't see that happening. So, if we can dispense with the rhetoric I'm willing to try to recondense some of my evaporated good will and take a stab at augmenting the console driver (and keycommand) to provide a better interface that the X server can use to automatically load the right keymap based on what's loaded in the console. It's not going to be a 100% solution because even if it gets into 2.2 and the next XFree86 beta there will always be someone who isn't running the right combination of things. -- Kaleb KEITHLEY
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