Dear xorg developers. This is an old bug. In fact this is a 13 years old bug. And it has been at least 7 years since this bug had a patch to fix it. Yes, existing patch breaks specification. But one would seem that the fact that patch existed for 7 years and was applied by default by popular distributions without users` complains would suggest that existing patch is a practical solution to the problem despite breaking theoretical (and as discussed here - not well thought through) specification. There is now once more spike of activity here - probably because Ubuntu 17.04 was released recently which dropped this patch because it was not compatible with newer xorg. kyak has provided an updated patch, but it would take a lot of time for distributions to pick it up and then circle would repeat with next xorg version.
Yes, there has been a few heated discussions around this patch and XKB specification. And yes, specifications are important, but this is really annoying problem for people with more than one keyboard layout. Annoying to the point of making xorg really unusable for some groups of people. So is there any chance to get more practical with this bug? For example, kyak's patch has a function 'xkbSwitchGroupOnRelease' that is a stub to make new behaviour controllable by configuration. Would xorg maintainers find this patch acceptable to upstream if that function read value from some environment variable and only turned new behaviour on if it was set? I feel like it would allow XKB spec to stay and also would allow users affected by this problem to solve it without recompiling xorg - which average user would struggle to do. Looking forward to your reply. Thanks! -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to xorg-server in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/36812 Title: Keyboard layout change on hotkeys press instead of release and do not work well with shortcuts Status in gnome-control-center: Unknown Status in X.Org X server: Confirmed Status in gnome-control-center package in Ubuntu: Invalid Status in xorg-server package in Ubuntu: Fix Released Bug description: This is a bug about shortcuts mapped to combinations which include each other. For example, if we have Ctrl+Shift (for keyboard layout) and Ctrl+Shift+N (to open a new terminal), then we are practically unable to use the second shortcut; this is what happens: Ctrl press (nothing happens) Shift press (keyboard layout change) N (a simple N appears, since a shortcut has already fired) The expected behavior is to fire shortcuts on the release (not on press) of the special keys (ctrl,shift,alt, etc) which is also how Windows behave. This is a serious problem for bilingual layouts, typically using Alt+Shift or Ctrl+Shift for keyboard layout change. For users being affected by this problem, the easiest solution for now is to add this PPA in your repositories: https://launchpad.net/~oded-geek/+archive/xorg-patches Practical summary of this bug for ubuntu developers (since reading 120 comments is impractical for most): This problem is a really old (since 2004) issue of the xkb part of xorg; the main discussion was made upstream in freedesktop-bugs #865. There has been a patch from Ilya Murav'jov for upstream (#55), and attached here (#61). Upstream xorg has refused to apply the patch, mainly because it "explicitly contradicts the (xkb) spec" (#84, #91). This patch has been reported to work for many people without any problems, and there is also a PPA by Oded Arbel (#95) where he maintains a patched version of the ubuntu xorg. The proper resolution of this bug would be to apply this patch to the upstream xorg, or at minimum to the official ubuntu xorg package. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-control-center/+bug/36812/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
