[Fwd: Re: Your final comments on gswitchit in 2.4...]

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

-----Пересланное сообщение-----
From: Sergey V. Oudaltsov <sergey.oudaltsov@clients.ie>
To: Murray.Cumming@Comneon.com
Cc: jdub@perkypants.org, jrb@redhat.com, jody@gnome.org, release-team@gnome.org
Subject: Re: Your final comments on gswitchit in 2.4...
Date: 23 Jun 2003 17:57:42 +0100

>>It is _essential_. Remove it - and you lose, ... 2/3 or Russian 
>>gswitchit users
> Sooner or later someone should explain to us why Russians are a special case
> here.
There is nothing special about Russian (except for Nuclear weapon, 
Sputnik and balalaika:). Any nation which has its own keyboard (and 
charset) but has to write in English (and communicate a lot in both 
native language and English) - would be in a same position. I am talking 
only about Russians because I know _for_sure_ about them. If we ask 
somethere near gnome-i18n about it - we could get larger picture.

> Doesn't each country have it's own keyboard layout anyway? Can you give us
> the real-world examples where this is actually necessary? I guess there must
> be one, but maybe if we know what it is then we can think of a better
> solution. I would prefer to use no flag (or all suitable flags) where no
> single flag is suitable.
There is Russian flags. But some (~10%) people want to have just [ru] - 
that's what I meant when I reffered to Windows standard keyboard 
switcher. No flags at all, just [ru] and [us] and so on...
I can implement this - and _then_ remove flag chooser. Would it be ok 
for GNOME?

> It depends which version of Windows you mean.
Well, NT4, Win2000, Win9x. I do not know about XP

> This is certainly not anything that we would want to maintain in GNOME.
Do not maintain it:). This part I can support myself (just 2 lines of 
code - reading the command from gconf and launching it)

> Maybe not if you don't call it gswitchit, but just call it part of GNOME.
You know what's going to happens next to this? People will either ask me 
to fork gswitchit or do it themselves - just to support features they 
need ("need" is essential here - not "fancy") - especially taking that 
features are already there.

> At some point a maintainer has to say No to new niche features.
OK. Taking that some (very popular) non-gnome keyboard switchers (like 
xxkb - people outside GNOME world really love it and I have to say 
thanks to his author for his ideas and help) already have this feature 
and people use it (I saw it myself) - I would not call it "niche".

> Let's not have that discussion all over again. We are GNOME, not KDE. We
> don't have insane clock preferences just because somebody somewhere believes
> it's necessary.:)
OK. I am trying to be constructive. So far, the things I could change in 
order to make life simpler:

1. Add checkbox "Use layout name instead of flag" (not necessary this 
exact wording) - and remove flag choosers.

2. Review the list of option menus and lists - and hide some of them 
(the list of hidden will be stored in gconf, with some reasonable default).

3. Any rewording and better terms would be more than welcome - I am not 
native English speaker, you know

4. Terminology - I would be gratefull is someone would comment whether 
it's better use XKB's one or invent GNOME own (which I'd prefer not to do).

What else could I do to lighten the UI and life in general:)? The idea 
about druid seems to be excessive...

Cheers,

Sergey
-- 
Sergey

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