Older blog entries for svu (starting at number 51)

libxklavier

After some interesting time with libxml2, I managed to optimize loading of base.xml (AKA xorg.xml). Custom SAX2 handler (derived from the standard one, building full DOM) ignores all unneeded translations - so gnome-settings-daemon's heap grows on ~500K only (was ~4M). This effect will be even more dramatic as more translations are available in that file.

gnome-control-center

Made XML loading lazy in gnome-settings-daemon (in 2.15). People not using keyboard-indicator got 4.5M extra RAM. Thanks to Ben for the idea.

General

TWIMC. I am going offline till 27.07. May be, I will be able to read gmail - but very unfrequently.

gnome-control-center

TWIMC: Unintentionally I created a cyclic dependency build bug in g-c-c. What a shame... I will do my best to fix it tonight.

It is time to split libgswitchit to a separate library. I feel it.

libxklavier + kde

Yesterday, Andriy started the process of incorporating libxklavier into kxkb. So GNOME and KDE4 will use the same keyboard configuration library. Isn't it good?

GNOME

Tonight committed a lot of stuff to gnome-applets, gnome-settings-daemon and gnome session. Major things:

• Now, gnome-control-center is DBUS-enabled. Supports 2 interfaces - one for gnome-session and one for keyboard indication (not used yet, but will be utilized very soon).
• Major libgswitchit API change - it now follows GNOME naming standards. I've felt uncomfortable for some while, supporting code which have not exactly looked like GNOME code.
• In libgswitchit, proper (well, nearly) GTK widget is created: GnomeKbdIndicator. Existing gnome indicator applet is already using it. I am planning to add this widget to the gnome screensaver prompt dialog as well..
• gnome-session is invoking gnome-settings-daemon using DBUS, not bonobo.

This is a big chunk of code, so I nearly expect a series of bugreports in near future.

xkeyboard-config

There is a layout which is the major (main?) PITA for me, all the time since I started dealing with XKB in GNOME. No, not the Hungarian one. The Canadian one. Historically (which means good old xfree 4.2 days and earlier) it contained two groups (4 shift levels each). They were split into two variants, so people had to combine them. In latest xkeyboard-config releases, I tried to compile single variant, with one group and (drums...) 8(!!!) shift levels. And I found there were not special XKB symbols defined in keysymdef.h for switching to the levels 5 and above. I tried to mimic them using rarely used functional keys (F21) - but it seems it was not good enough - still, toolkits/apps interpreted these F* keys as valid input. So, I asked xorg to add several more characters to keysymdef.h: XK_ISO_Level5_*. A couple of days ago, Daniel Stone committed them to CVS (thanks indeed, Daniel). Now, I am kindly asking all people maintaining Xorg builds in various distributions to apply this patch when releasing their coming updates. It would not break any API/ABI. It would allow me to commit the normal fix for the Canadian layout to xkeyboard-config, so people could use it. For more details, see the fd.o bug.

GNOME

About to commit the changes to gnome-applets and gnome-control-center for the new libxklavier API. Expecting loads of complains:)

xkbconfig

For all X Window keyboard-related discussions, I created community xkbconfig in LiveJournal. Everyone having lj accounts is welcome to participate. Probably it is worth inclusion into Planet Freedesktop

GNOME

Nasty bug caused by broken pangoxft usage is fixed. Ugh... For a person having very slight idea about pango, it was a bit of fun. Thanks to Owen for the hint - gtk-demo really helped.

XKeyboardConfig

Release 0.6 is really soon now. Unfortunately, during last two weeks I got only one (1!!!) Turkish translation. Translation Project is a bit too slow, I'd say...

xkeyboard-config

Layouts are coming and coming in, xkeyboard-config is getting popular, slowly. It is very difficult to distinguish - which layouts are worth including, which are not. Till that point, we accepted everything - but I'm afraid soon I'll have to learn the word 'No'.

BTW, Swedish people - would you mind having Russian phonetic variant in your layout?;) Wouldn't it be offensive? Same question to the people of the country between Canada and Mexico.

Actually, I would appreciate if someone familiar with the multiple Indian languages (not necessary speaking but being able to discuss the situation) would contact me. svu at gnome dot org, as usual.