RE: [Usability] Re: [Fwd: Re: Your final comments on gswitchit in2.4...]

["Sergey V. Oudaltsov" <sergey oudaltsov clients ie>]

> > 2. In 4.2.x- one layout very often contains several groups. Actually,
> > layout "ru" has 2 groups "US/ASCII" and "Russian".
> 
> So why wouldn't you show 2 flags here?
I can. But their filenames should be "calculatable" from "US/ASCII" and
"Russian" strings. Not from "ru" and "us" as it is for 4.3.0. The
calculation can be done just by escaping "bad characters" or by
introducing some _hardcoded_ :-/ map like { "US/ASCII"->"us",
"Russian"->"ru" etc }.

> > 3. When applet gets current group number (say, 0) it gets the 
> > group name
> > in form ("US/ASCII"). The layout name "ru" simply cannot be 
> > used here -
> So you can't show a flag here either, because you don't know about that "ru"
> group?
Almost so. Actually, there is no group "ru". There is layout "ru" which
contains group "Russian". The good thing about 4.3.0 is that one can use
layout names instead of group names (because of 1-1 mapping) and in
earlier versions - one cannot (because layouts include several groups
and cannot be combined properly).

> Hmm, I don't claim to understand all of this, but I hope that this is a good
> explanation for people who are less ignorant than me.
:) Sorry, I tried to explain it as simple as I could. Probably I will
try one more time later:)

> Does gswitchit currently work with XFree < 4.3.0?
It should in theory (well, no bug reports so far:). But some functions
are different:
1. It allows to choose only one layout (because no merging is possible)
- which is confusing but not a show stopper (because one layout can
contain several groups).
2. The group names are used in applet UI, not layout names. So it is not
localized (Russian people see strings "US/ASCII" and "Russian") - and
there is no way to get the flag filename automatically - so some
hardcoded flags are used as initial values.
Other than this, it should work in same way as in 4.3.0 (if it is not -
welcome to bugzilla, I am going to support these versions till GNOME
officially approves switching to 4.3.0)

> Hopefully someone can still come up with a better solution. If not then
> maybe we really need to consider being dependent on a newer version of
> XFree, though other XWindows systems are used too, for instance on Solaris.
That's the whole point. I am pretty sure GNOME could relatively easily
forget about 4.2.0 - but not about commercial X servers - which still
use pretty old SGIish xkb stuff.

> This part of the discussion is less fun.
Sure. And it really HAS to be discussed here. I would really love to
hear from someone using Solaris about their experience with XKB - and
especially from someone who is involved in Solaris OS development (there
are people from Sun here, aren't there?) - whether Solaris has some
roadmap in xkb area - whether they want to pick up the nice things
introduced in XFree 4.3.0. This is very, very serious issue.

-- 
Sergey

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