Re: RFC : gnome and non-linux oses

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2011-01-28 at 16:23 +0000, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> Hi folks
> 
> Yesterday, the code supporting choosing xkb model was removed from
> control center - because on linux all keycodes are based on evdev
> (techically correct statement - but only for linux) and noone really
> cares about geometry.
> 
> Is there official policy related to supporting gnome on non-linux
> platforms? If some UI is harmless but gives little functionality on
> linux and really useful on other oses - should it be kept?
> 
> I am not fighting for a single button (I like it when code is removed)
> - I am asking to provide guidelines, to avoid confusion in future.

In this particular case, I'm the one who removed the code. To be honest,
I'm not even sure that changing the keyboard model would have been all
that useful on any slightly recent Unix-like OSes.

The keyboard model should be auto-detected for USB and Bluetooth input
devices, and I don't have any data saying that it's at all useful for,
say, PS/2, or other undetectable keyboard types.

Let's take a Sun machine with Solaris on it, does it really print out
weird characters when you have both a "legacy" keyboard plugged in, and
a USB one (X only supports one keyboard model, and the result would be
garbage being printed when typing keys. Linux users remember a couple of
years ago when X.org switched to using evdev and you had some custom
keymaps in your XF86Config).

In this particular case, I think it's a non-problem, and I'd rather
remove it and get complaints afterwards rather than preach for the
status quo, knowing full well that the setting will be useless and
potentially confusing for a majority of users.

Cheers