Don't touch keyboard setup

[David Mohr]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 5:22 AM, Jelle de Jong
<jelledejong at powercraft.nl> wrote:
> Olivier Fourdan wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 9:31 AM, Jelle de Jong
>> <jelledejong at powercraft.nl> wrote:
>>> David Mohr wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 5:21 PM, Bernhard Walle <bernhard.walle at gmx.de> wrote:
>>>>> * Olivier Fourdan [2008-10-18 00:06]:
>>>>>> Disable support for xklavier in xfce4-settings
>>>>> Well, I don't find the option. In the keyboard settings I can select a
>>>>> keyboard model and layout, but where can I disable that?
>>>> It is a compile time option. You need to rebuild the xfce4-settings package.
>>>>
>>>> ~David
>>> Maybe its an idea to make this option available for the end user,
>>> without the need for manually recompiling. I for one would like to have
>>> control over my settings without the need to recompile.
>>>
>>> Are there more people that do not like to recompile packages to disable
>>> some functionality?
>>
>> When I started xfce4 several years ago, my goal was to avoid
>> unnecessary options as much as I could, because it confuses users and
>> makes to code uneedlessly complex.
>>
>> Over the years we have somehow lost this from sight and added options
>> for anything and everything.
>>
>> How many users need such an option? If it's less than 1 out of 10,
>> then the answer is no.
>>
>
> I you talk about options in the graphical environment, then I fully
> agree with you, keep gui as clean and simple as possible.
>
> However please try to design your application that everything done in
> the GUI can be done with command line tools to. And that configuration
> options can be accessed as file (preferably an human readable one)
>
> So if we talk about something as important as how the keyboard response
> then i think it should be configurable without recompilation packages.
> So an good configuration file would be preferable.
>
> Just my thoughts, how do other people think about this?

I agree with Oliver that this option would be rather cryptic to most
users, and would only be used by a very small number of them.

With xfconf, one can easily modify all configuration through the
command line. But adding options to that which don't show up in the
GUI takes you in the direction of gconf / Windows registry, which I
always thought was not good - I don't personally want to have to look
through the configuration storage to find hidden options, many of
which end up being poorly documented.

Actually rolling your own packages is really not difficult these days.
I.e. for debian, you just run apt-get source, modify the configure
line in debian/rules, and then rebuild the package with
dpkg-buildpackage.

~David