It would be nice if I had a pony too, but it's not going to happen. Sergey, who you were talking with in that LiveJournal entry, is the maintainer of the GNOME XKB tools, as well as the upstream maintainer of the XKB layouts. He and I (in my guise of upstream XKB, and general input, code maintainer) interact quite a lot.
Input methods need to support arbitrarily complex compositions of glyphs, and often need user feedback to do so, which completely rules out the server doing it. So what we're down to is having the server be able to kick an external client on group switch, and have the client be able to react accordingly. Yes, that's feasible as part of a protocol extension, but it's quite far down the TODO list. There are exactly two people who hack on input in X, code-wise, and the other one generally doesn't venture too far outside the evdev driver. Pre-compiled layouts are a bad idea that are being removed from XKB 2.0 (the code needs a serious rework to fix far more fundamental problems than the one you've discussed). Implementing a layout cache is possible (if costly). I'll think about it, but don't expect anything soon. I need to finish the input hotplug work, then finish most of the XKB rework, then add this, then it needs to get added to an Xorg stable release, at which point the GNOME applet can start using it. You'll need to wait for the next stable release for this to be included. This ... is not a short timespan. -- Impossible to configure more the 4 keyboard layouts https://launchpad.net/bugs/56912 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
