Hi, there is currently a keyboard layout in development, which is for german people, but it has nothing in common with the "normal" german layout qwertz.
There is a previous version of that keyboard layout integrated as the variant "Neostyle" of de. Lately it came up for discussion on the Neo-Layout mailing list, if maybe Neo could be a separate keyboard layout, which might allow it to add variants of it to X.org, too. (For example Neo 1.1, which is currently the Neostyle variant of de could be kept as the neo1.1 variant of Neo, and a One-Hand Neo (usable with one Hand only, similar to ENTI-key++), as well as a Neo 3.0 are planned, plus there are smaller variants for special purpose, too, similar to the "nodeadkeys" variant for de.) Now the main question was if such a change (to add it as a separate layout instead of a variant) would actually be allowed. There sure would be advantages for the Neo users, but maybe you X.org people say that that is a no go and it should be kept in "de", even though it doesn't have anything in common with the standard de layout. The README file doesn't explicitly state, that there may be no non-language keyboard layouts, instead it says, that the name must be 5 to 8 characters, but maybe in reality you would try to prevent the addition of such a layout? So... thoughts on that? The next question is about the handling of the rules files. It seems that all major desktop environments only read out the base* or the xorg* files. Now when a user wants to add his own, custom, layout, he has to replace these files, which causes problems if he uses a package management system, since those files would most likely replaced, if he reinstalls/updates the package. The alternative is to not modify these files, but then it is not possible to use the layout switching capabilities of the desktop environment. To improve this situation, I would suggest to not use rules *files*, but rules *directories*. For example, there could be a xorg.d directory instead of the xorg* files, which contains the respective .xml and .lst files. The difference is, that the actual layout list is not read from a single file, but from all files within that directory. That would it make possible for a user to place his custom keyboard layout into a .xml and a .lst file within that dir and make it available for the desktop environment. Regards, Bernd _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
