Alexander:

> 2008/12/1 Calum Benson <Calum.Benson at sun.com <mailto:Calum.Benson at 
> sun.com>> 
>     On 27 Nov 2008, at 14:57, Johann Gile wrote:
>      > why does the GNOME Keyboard Preferences not have a 'Layouts' tabs as
>      > in Linux?
> 
>     The short answer is that the Linux version is rather broken.
>  
> Isn't that a bit *too* short? :) 

Did you not read the bug report pointers Calum provided?  They explain the
problem in detail.

> I mean, after all, the Linux
> version allows to easily achieve what he (and also I)
> wants.

libxklavier depends on X.org Xserver interfaces which are not a part of the
X11 specifications.  Therefore, if you use libxklavier across different
Xservers (such as X.org and Xsun), then it can behave in very broken ways.
For example, even Xmodmap files do not have a standard format.  It would
be better if X11 provided more specified interfaces for accessing this sort
of information.

It would probably be nice to provide GNOME packages with libxklavier support
enabled for users who don't care about its limitations, perhaps via an IPS
repository.

With a bit of effort you could build libxklavier yourself, and recompile a
few modules which depend on it (such as gnome-control-center and
gnome-applets) and then it should work the same as on Linux.  There are
instructions how to build code like this here:

   http://opensolaris.org/os/project/jds/contributing/building/

> As far as functionality is concerned (and as far as getting
> stuff to work the way you want it), it's much more so, that
> the OpenSolaris version is rather broken.

In the past it has been harder to integrate components that do not use
sensible cross-platform interfaces, such as libxklavier.  If the upstream
X11 community thought this issue were important enough to address better
in the X11 specification then this would be the "right" place to fix this
problem.  So encouraging them to address the problem rather than a
specific distro, such as OpenSolaris, would be more effective.

Brian

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