Freeze break request - gnome-settings-daemon - bug 681685

[Rui Tiago Cação Matos <tiagomatos gmail com>]

Hello,

with the transition to the unified input sources design we lost the
ability to use the XKB option that would configure a shortcut inside
the X server itself to switch between keyboard layouts.

This is a regression that can't be 100% fixed with the current
architecture where it's gnome-settings-daemon doing the shortcut keys
grabbing and the fact that those traditional shortcuts consisted of
modifier only keys like Alt+Shift.

Yet, we can partially fix it with some clever key grabbing like the
current locate pointer feature does. So I basically re-used the locate
pointer code to implement something that works relatively well except
that it doesn't have all the options that the traditional XKB option
had (although I'm adding some more right now) but I think it has the
most important ones. It also doesn't work in the shell overview but
that's part of the architectural problem I mentioned before (see bug
643111).

Anyway the patches are at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681685 .

I tried to make it so that this doesn't have much impact on the main
gnome-settings-daemon itself by doing the actual work in a separate
process (again just like locate-pointer) and this will have to be
turned on explicitly by the user in gsettings (or on g-t-t once I get
to it) so I believe it is safe to break the code freeze for this.

Thanks,
Rui