Re: 3.6 Feature: IBus/XKB integration

[Sergey Udaltsov <sergey udaltsov gmail com>]

Hi Rui

As a person maintaining libgnomekbd/libxklavier, I have some questions
regarding that plan:

1. What about non-gtk apps not having IBus integration? How are they
going to be supported? Say, good old motif;)
1.1. How do you plan to provide network transparency without switching
layouts on X server level?

2. Actually, libxklavier and libgnomekbd are useful not only for
switching, but for some other things. For example:
  - (libxklavier) reading xml registry supplied by xkeyboard-config
  - (libgnomekbd) providing keyboard layout preview
Are these bits going to be reimplemented from the scratch?

3. How are you going to address the fact that some international
layouts can be alternatively implemented using XKB and Ibus? Will you
let user choose? How will you explain him the nature of that choice
(purely technical detail)?

I am all for integration of IBus and XKB, but it is important to make
it properly, without sacrificing the habits of existing userbase - and
with proper support of good X11 citizen apps, even if they are not
blessed by the modern toolkit.

Thanks,

Sergey

> Reasons to drop libgnomekbd and libxklavier are that they rely on XKB
> groups to switch between different layouts but XKB limits groups to
> only 4. Also because the keybindings to switch groups are handled on
> the X server directly and we are limited to just some choices which
> causes us to currently have them separate from all the other
> keybindings in GNOME.