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

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

> If pixmap customization is currently mainly only used as a solution for
> people finding flags inappropriate or offensive, then I consider it a
> workaround for that problem, but as with all workarounds a fix that
> doesn't really adress the problem itself. The solution you describe
> above is much better in that respect.
No, historically it was not the case. In XFree <4.3.0, layouts could not
be combined the _same_ way as they can in 4.3.0. So once person choosen
layout "ru" in 4.2.0 - it got two(!) groups - "US/ASCII" and "Russian".
And same story about many other layouts. So for me there was NO way to
find the exact flag for these groups (unless I'd call flags
"US/ASCII".png and "Russian".png or invent some weird mapping). That is
why I allowed people to choose flags themselves (I simply had no way to
do it myself without bad hacks). Now, in XFree 4.3.0, people can combine
single-group layouts (thanks to Ivan Pascal) and gswitchit _assumes_
that layout name (us,ru,..) is a group name (which is true - you have to
use special options to change this default mode). So actually after that
point I use layout name instead of group name (and this layout name, in
localized form, I take from xfree86.xml) - and I can use layout id
(us,ru,...) to form the flag name. This is only possible in XFree
4.3.0+. So the whole point of this story is - flag chooser was necessary
to compensate some weirdness of xkb configuration which I could not
change. And actually when getting rid of it - I really say goodbay to
all folks with XFree <4.3.0 (well, from their point of view gswitchit
would show incorrect names/flags) - which I am ready to do but what
about the GNOME team?

> Sometimes people answer with the most crazy ideas in my experience, and
True. There were requests...:)
> implement what users ask for, instead of integrating solutions to the
> actual problems you've found out about, you'll often end up with all
> kinds of weird workarounds and conflicting behavior.
:) I 101% agree. I always tried to make gswitchit as non-contraversal as
possible (to the best of my understanding). I always hoped secondary
layouts (despite the bad wording) are simple and can be considered as
real feature.

> Was that a performerance issue? Then I'm probably not the correct person
> to answer that. I don't know how big the performerance impact is.
Well, it takes about 5s to show the preview for the first time and about
3s to update it. So IMHO it is reasonable response time for the button
click, is it (actually, bonobo window appears in about a second)? So
this aspect does not bother me too much. The problem is the overall
gswitchit-bonobo-ggv link ... somewhat instable (very ofter I see in
console some weird messages from bonobo inside). I would really love
Jaka to give me a hand at this point.

Actually, in critical situation I can just hide the "Preview" button
till I find this feature really stable and usable (for example, till
2.6). But I would not like to skip it entirely (and even less I like the
idea to render the keyboard myself - xkbprint is already doing it well).

Cheers,

-- 
Sergey

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