Re: gswitchit [Was: Release Team's Almost-Final Modules List]

["Sergey V. Oudaltsov" <sergey oudaltsov clients ie>]

> Okay, so somewhere along the line misinformation about gswitchit went
> rampant and poisoned everyone's minds. :-)
:) Accepted:)

> The remaining significant points about gswitchit were: its level of
> integration within GNOME, and usability / interface design problems.
It uses GNOME control center for XKB and applet confuguration (well, 
probably the applet configuration itself should be taken out - no 
problem, it is awailable from the applet menu anyway).

Unfortunatly, I did not get any serious usabiligy/HIG-noncompliance 
reports yet. If you got some - could you please forward them to bugzilla 
(or to me directly).

> We need to ensure that further integration work will not require new
> features beyond the feature freeze on June 9, and given that the initial UI
OK. Actually, gswitchit is in kind of "feature freeze" state for rather 
long time (since I released the version compatible with XFree 4.3.0). 
All I could take from XFree 4.3.0 is already taken into libxklavier. All 
I do now is random bugfixing. The only serious UI part which bothers me 
now is bonobo-ggv-based XKB keyboard layout preview. I asked (here, in 
the list) the question about most GNOME-compatible way of doing this - 
and still got not a single answer:(

About the bugs - it seems my users have latest XFree, so I don't know 
(no bugreports) how well latests gswitchit deals with xfree earlier than 
4.3 (well, earlier versions of gswitchit were ok for xfree 4.1 and 4.2 
at least). Also, non-xfree servers were not reported. All I can claim is 
that I do not use any xfree-specific XK things except the ones 
introduced in 4.3.0 - and I am trying to check the configuration at 
runtime. As I said, bug reports are always welcome.

> freeze is on July 7, we also need to be sure that gswitchit is at least
> ready for UI review by then (rather than being at the 'redesign' stage).
I would be the first person interested in UI review. Probably the latest 
version is ready even now.

> Is this stuff doable, and if it happens, will gswitchit have broad user
> support? (I'm assuming it will, given comments about the current switcher!)
:) Well, at least in Russia gswitchit already have it. Also I got 
occational bug-reports and thanks from other countries. But I did not do 
any special PR - so probably there is a big market of international 
users who just do not happen do know about it:)

Cheers,

Sergey