[gnome-cyr] ANNOUNCE: gswitchit_applet 0.93, libxklavier 0.3, xfree86_xkb_xml 0.3

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

Hi

Is there anybody still interested in GNOME 1 XKB-related stuff?
Well, for these geeks exclusively:

Three bits of technology are released. 

About gswitchit 0.93:

The last milestone release of the GSwitchIt toolkit for GNOME 1

GSwitchIt is going to say "farewell" to GNOME 1. So all the best
features of XKB handling/configuration/management are here today. There
can be some future bugfix releases in 0.9x series (though I cannot
really promise) but most of the new development will be done in GNOME 2.
So the next version will most probably be GSwitchIt 2.0 for GNOME 2.

The current version adds more correct handling of the global XKB
configuration (if user wants to use things written in XF86Config) - in
read-only mode. Some UI polishing according to GNOME Human Interface
Guidelines 1.0 was performed. Tooltips show some useful info in many
cases now. The UI terminology of "groups" and "layouts" is more strict
and correspond to X Window stardards now (though may be a bit confusing
for some users:).

The important change in general XKB configuration handling: now user
does not have to add the applet into the GNOME panel to get all the
settings from XKB capplet installed at the session startup. Instead, the
XKB configuration capplet adds itself to the GNOME session startup
sequence and loads the XKB configuration itself.

Thanks to GNOME Translation Project, Norwegian translation is added.

Some fixes for the latest gcc/autoconf/automake were done too.

Known issues:
1. As usual, in all GNOME 1 releases, the applet configuration is
activated after the applet restart only.
2. The applet configuration menu item sometimes hangs the applet. It is
known problem (Xlib is a major suspect here). So it is recommended to
configure the applet from gnomecc or directly launching
gswitchit-properties-capplet.

That's all about the user-visible part. A bit about libxklavier 0.3:

The third development release of libxklavier XKB utility library.

Now libxklavier is in a nearly "feature freeze"/"API freeze" state till
1.0 release.

Since the only using it application (gswitchit toolkit) is going to have
massive architectural changes associated with porting to GNOME 2
platform, no major changes are planned for the nearest future. Sure, if
anyone would be interested in adding something useful...

This version adds some extra configuration handling sugar. Now an
application can backup and restore XKB configuration using X root
window's properties in a generic way. The standard way X Window is doing
this (in "_XKB_RULES_NAMES" property only) is not generic enough. Now an
application can be sure that the property  "_XKB_RULES_NAMES_BACKUP"
contains the original XKB configuration, straight from XF86Config
(taking that XklBackupNamesProp is called properly). Also, any arbitrary
property can be used to keep XKB configuration - if necessary.

About the deadlines. I think 1.0 is not going to be released before the
XFree86 version which would incorporate multiple layouts, XML-based
configuration registry (now in xfree86_xkb_xml). Only after that great
event, some testing and user feedback, the world will hopefully see
libxklavier 1.0.

Some fixes for the latest gcc/autoconf/automake were done too.

That's generally it about the library. And the last component ... Well
almost nothing has changed. Some cosmetic things, you know. About i18n,
letter casing etc.

So, see all of you in a wonderful new world, world of Unicode, smooth
fonts and nice graphics, world of GNOME 2 (still missing proper XKB
solution yet:)

Sergey