[g-a-devel]at-spi bincompat breakage request

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Hi:

This is a request for an idl change for at-spi.  It not a large API
change, but it will break binary compatibility.  It seems that parts of
bug 80616 cannot be fixed within the current API, and on reflection I
think the problem is more severe for some use cases than the bug report
indicates.

KeySet is currently defined as 

typedef sequence<long> KeySet;

which we propose to change to 

struct KeyDefinition {
	long keycode;
	long keysym;
	string keystring;
	long unused;
};

typedef sequence<KeyDefinition> KeySet;


Most clients will use convenience methods to create keysets and thus
will not see this as API change; only clients which currently construct
keysets by hand (at the moment only a couple of demos) will see this as
API change.  These two demos live in at-spi, so the resulting code
changes should be restricted to this one module.

I hope that this change will be allowed (note that I have added a
padding member to the struct) since the alternative is to disable an
important piece of API as unimplementable with the current definition,
and presumably add replacement API at a later date.

Best regards,

Bill