Older blog entries for svu (starting at number 59)

Yesterday, as a possible act of suicide;), I finally committed a huge chunk of libgnomekbd-related changes to gnome-control-center and gnome-applets. Expecting a lot of bug reports.

Next stop: gnome-screensaver.

xkeyboard-config

Nearly every time I work with modifier-related bugs, I have 2 seconds of real hatred to XKB-ignorant apps. Especially and mostly emacs.

BTW, if someone is interested in next year's Google Summer of Code project ideas, here is a couple of good ones:

• versatile protocol level debugger for X
• putting traces into xkb code in Xorg: xkbcomp, X server, libxkbfile
• valgrinding and unit testing of XKB code in Xorg

Finally, gnome-applets are branched. Thanks, Davyd, for the help - and hurray! Immediately after 2.17.1 is out, I am going to commit libgnomekbd-related stuff to gnome-applets, gnome-control-center, gnome-screensaver (finally getting rid of CVS virtual modules libgswitchit and libkbdraw).

Spent several hours yesterday improving GkbdConfigRegistry DBUS interface and running unit tests on libgnomekbd. Found a couple of minor bugs in libgnomekbd and libxklavier (fixed version to be released soon). The good thing is that both APIs seem to be pretty stable at that point (new version of libxklavier works fine even with GNOME 2.16).

Now that release 0.9 is out, I am going to put xkeyboard-config into background mode (except for Japanese keyboard bug) and commit libgnomekbd/gnome-applets/gnome-control-center/gnome-screensaver stuff into 2.17. Not earlier than Davyd branches gnome-applets though... ;) Also, a release of gswitchit-plugins for 2.16 is long overdue.

Separating gnome keyboard-related code into separate library finally allowed me to approach long outstanding bug in gnome-screensaver. That is what I currently see on my laptop:

Sure, in vanilla GNOME there won't be any flags, only labels.

Great thanks to Ubuntu folks (especially to BenC) for fixing Edgy Eft kernel on G5. I returned from MacOS back to good old (well, rather new) GNOME 2.16. Lads, you rock! If you just would not have broken it at the first place...;)

Also, guys, what did you do to Epiphany so that it does not work with gmail? Even Firefox's beta feels more stable...

xkeyboard-config

If everything is ok, next release is going to happen within a couple of weeks or so...

A mess of two virtual modules, libgswitchit and kbdraw, finally got a real chance to be resolved. Heavily refactored, they are combined into one proper library libgnomekbd. Finally, decent unit test applets are created. Actually, there are 2 .so objects - one is "gui-less", for linking to things like gnome-settings-daemon.

Next step would be replacing virtual modules in g-c-c and g-a with new extra dependency (I foresee hot discussions with respective maintainers:) - and, as I promised several times, adding indicator to gnome-screensaver dialog.

People already reported several times nasty problems with the layout preview. Now I can see it myself - XKBlib(xlib) in Ubuntu Edgy Eft is broken, so XkbGetKeyboard returns null. I can just wonder why...

Since my crazy idea to update to Ubuntu Eft killed temporary my Power G5 (well, not macos part of it:), I has to fallback temporary to my good old Acer laptop. Ubuntu folks, please please fix your kernels ASAP...

gsw...

I am considering separation of the virtual module libgswitchit to a standalone library libgnome-kbd-indicator (it later can be merged to any other library, subject to discussion) within 2.18 cicle.

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.

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.