Re: 3.6 Feature: IBus/XKB integration

[Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com>]

2012/5/1 Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>:
> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 7:12 AM, Giovanni Campagna
> <scampa giovanni gmail com> wrote:
>
>
>>
>> So, assuming this is indeed a limit that we want to fix, why not
>> fixing at the right level, i.e. Xorg?
>> I recently looked at the Xkb and XI2 protocols, and I saw no
>> particular limitations to using more than 4 groups (up to 255, which
>> is a much more reasonable limit). There is indeed a limitation in the
>> core protocol, but that's only used by legacy applications.
>> In any case, I believe this discussion should be moved to xorg-devel,
>> as the proposed solution (setxkbmap equivalent) not only has
>> performance regressions, it will also cause problems with keybindings
>> in non-latin layouts, as applications will no longer have another
>> latin group to fallback on.
>
> The problem is that xkb uses 2 bits in the core event state mask to
> communicate the group. That limitation very much affects xkb. A while
> an xkb2 would be nice, it seems a pipe dream at this point. People
> have been talking about it for years, nothing ever happened.

Yes, I saw that, and that's what I meant when I talked about legacy
applications. XInput2 uses 8 bit for the effective group, so it's not
limited to 4, and that's what modern toolkits use.