Harold,
This is simply a bug report. The FACT is that if you start XFree with the numlock key on, the keyboard doesn't work properly. There have been plenty of other posts about this in the past so I'm not the first to report this. Even if you don't care about it, and it doesn't affect you, I think you'll find a lot of users (who don't necessarily post here) have come across the numlock issue. I know my users have, and everyone agrees this is a BUG.
I don't agree that it is a bug. I believe that this is simply the side effect of changes made to how numlock is handled in the X Window System; those changes were beyond our control and not all libraries and applications have been updated in the 5 or more years since those changes to handle numlock properly. Thus, anything that we do to turn numlock off will only be a partial work-around, not a bug fix. If it was a bug fix then it would apply all the time, but it can't be applied all the time because the majority of users that don't use LessTif or Motif applications will wonder why their numlock key keeps turning off.
No one has asked you to do the work for this though - If I can, I'll provide the patch using Thomas' code, but as the one in charge of this project, you're the man who says whether such a patch goes into the build. I was just trying to get some involvement from you, maybe encouragement.
Yeah you did ask me to do the work, you sent me a private message asking if I was interested.
I'm not saying it wouldn't go in. I think it is farely obvious that it something doesn't change the default behavior then it goes in almost automatically. I say go for it.
Now, you might still be wondering why I'm not interested. I'm not interested in writing it myself because I spent about five minutes thinking about it and came up with various questions about how this should behave when Cygwin/X loses or regains keyboard focus. I also don't particularly like changing the keyboard state. Then I started thinking that maybe a better way to do this would be to make a command-line parameter that causes numlock to not be specified as a mask key. I also figured that an even better way may be an option on the tray menu that lets you toggle a numlock-override during your session that just makes numlock look like it is off without actually changing the keyboard state.
See what I mean about how I don't think this has been completely thought out? Somebody needs to make this one their own and it sounds like you are interested, so go for it.
I personally liked the idea of adding a flag to the XWin command line e.g.
Xwin -numlockoff
but if you're saying this is a non-starter I won't bother.
I never said it was a non-starter. I just said "I'm not the man for the job" because it sounded like you were asking me to write the code for you.
Absolutely not. If it sounded like I was asking you to do the work - that's my fault, I should have worded my email better, I only wanted your advice/approval.
That said, you did seem to be ignoring the numlock issue. Usually you are very quick to reply and helpful, aren't you?! :)
Believe it or not, I get a lot of grief about the numlock key and I tried telling my users what you said before about it not being a bug, but now everyone thinks I'm in denial! They call me "numnuts" at work now!
Anyway, you obviously have a better understanding of the problem but I don't think you can expect a bugfix to anticipate future changes. I doubt whether today's XFree will work on all future releases of Windows.
I'll crack on with trying to write a patch and hopefully I'll be able to contribute some code (with a bit of support and guidance along the way?).
Cheers,
JS.
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