> The only xkb_symbols "us" that I see are in digital/us and
> > xfree68/ataritt.
> > But the map would be the same as the xkb_symbols "basic" in pc/us,
> > basically, the same as latin(basic) only not including the group 2 or
> > 3 symbols (exclamdown, etc.). However, it would be in the latin file
> > and included in the other us files.
>
> Could you please differentiate between "levels" and "groups" in XKB
> terminology. All keymaps in pc/ should use *only* one group to
> facilitate multi-layout features of XKB in XFree 4.3.
Sorry, I meant shift levels. my proposed us-ascii would have just
key <AE01> { [ 1, exclam ] };
not
key <AE01> { [ 1, exclam, onesuperior, exclamdown ] };
Sorry for misusing the terminology.
> But basicaly, this could be done simply without breaking compatibility.
> You just create a xkb_symbols("ascii") in pc/us file, and put
> "NoSymbol" or "any" on higher levels, and just include that from
> "basic".
Yeah. My simple proposed change here is to move these definitions to the latin
symbol file, then include them from the appropriate us symbol files. I don't
think it would break compatability. I do think that it would remind people
who make new keymaps that the default US behavior has to be to only output
ASCII, because that is the lowest common denominator for the US.
> (Btw, "basic" in "pc/us" is practically "us", eg. just calling
> "setxkbmap -layout us" will set the "pc/us(basic)" map).
Wouldn't `setxkbmap -layout us` set the "us(basic)" map and `setxkbmap -layout
pc/us` set the pc/us(basic) map?
> > OK, so we can pick another name. My point is to preserve the (blurred)
> > difference between nations and languages. Nations determine keyboard
> > layouts, not languages (the French, Canadians, and Swiss all use
> > different keyboards to type the French language - azerty, qwerty, and
> > qwertz). But see more below.
>
> I tend to disagree with this statement. There are a couple of language
> (a dozen at most) that are used in several countries in the world (like
> Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, English,...). For those languages,
> and for those countries, your proposal would be sane.
>
> Alas, there are another 150+ countries with even more languages that
> don't belong into this category, and where the relation
> language => country strongly holds.
>
> So, maybe this would make sense for several keymaps, but it wouldn't
> for most of them, especially since one may want to use a *language*
> while in other country -- and many users (especially novices) will make
> mistake if they're located in Germany, and then choose "Germany" as
> their keymap (not knowing that they're actually setting a keyboard map
> because they're just honestly stating their country of location), even
> though they want to type in English.
Using a German keymap doesn't prohibit you from typing in English. However, if
you own a keyboard made for Switzerland, but you set the keymap to be German
(the dominant language here), you won't be able to type the characters on
your keyboard -- like finding the @. Besides novices won't be setting this,
the administrator will.
However, I imagine that using a Bengali keyboard will prevent one from typing
in Hindi (or something).
> So, I cannot see any advantage to the naming scheme you seem to be
> proposing, yet there are many disadvantages.
I agree. I think there are two ways of looking at this, but there are three
types of keymap files: national (based on ISO 3166 country codes),
linguistic (ISO 639 language codes) , and random.
Looking just in the pc/ directory, I see the following breakdown:
National:
al (Albania) am (Armenia) be (Belgium) bg (Bulgaria) br (Brazil) by
(Belorussia) cz cz_qwerty (Czech Republic) de (Germany) dk (Denmark) ee
(Estonia) el (Greece) es (Spain) fi (Finland) fo (Faroe Islands) fr fr-latin9
(France) gb (Britain) ge_la ge_ru (Georgia) hr (Croatia) ie (Ireland) il
il_phonetic (Israel) ir (Iran) is (Iceland) it (Italy) lo (Laos) lt
(Lithuania) lv (Latvia) mk (Macedonia) ml (Malaysia) mm (Burma) mt mt_us
(Malta) nl (The Netherlands) no (Norway) pl pl2 (Poland) pt (Portugal) ro
(Romania) ru (Russia) se (Sweden) si (Slovenia) sk sk_qwerty (slovakia) sr
(Serbia) th th_pat th_tis (Thailand) tj (Turkmenistan) tr (Turkish) ua
(Ukraine) us (United States) uz (Uzbekistan) yu (Yugoslavia)
Linguistic: ar(abic), ben(gali), hi(ndi), guj(arati), gur(mukhi),
iu(inuktitut), kan(nada), ogham, ori(ya), sami, telugu, tamil
Random: dvorak en_US la latin pc
So it seems that a good compromise would be to recomment the ones of the
national type to reflect the name of the country (in English), and to leave
the ones of the lingustic type to refect the name of the language (in
English). Does that address your concerns?
For the random ones, dvorak will have to stay, and both latin and pc are kind
of include files (though it there ever comes a country or language with ISO
code pc ...) The two that I'm worried about are en_US (which looks like a
locale for no good reason) and la (which stands for Latin America, but la is
the country code for Laos, which has taken lo instead).
So, any ideas for what the Latin America keymap should be called?
latin_america comes to mind. :)
But for en_US, I'd like to integrate it into the us file and make en_US just
include us(latin1). I'd like to make these changes and send patches to
someone with access. Is anyone here willing to check them in?
> > This is kind of an odd request and has to do more with the keycodes
> > than the symbols. But, if all the files distributed with XFree86 used
> > the new RLGO symbols, then the only problem would be for users who
> > were doing customisation with xmodmap or who had their own xkb files
> > that hadn't been sent to XF86 for inclusion. Or perhaps there's a way
> > to preserve the compatability.
>
> I am all for it -- I don't like calling that operating system of theirs
> a "win" (as in "victory"), so I'd agree on this change (even though
> that would break compatability for some of my keymaps I am distributing
> outside of XFree86 main distribution).
>
> Still, I believe XF86 supports adding several different symbols that
> map to the same key code.
I'd like to do this, too. Do you know how to map multipe symbols to one key
code and how to make it usable? (Perhaps adding an XkbOption?)
> PS. I am probably a little biased, because I come from those "other 150
> countries", but I hope I have made at least a couple of valid points.
No problem. I'm biased too. I asked so I'd get other peoples biases. :)
Frank
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