xfce4-xkb-plugin rework

[Jérôme Guelfucci]

On 28/07/12 08:12, Igor Slepchin wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> So I've finally gotten tired of xfce4-xkb-plugin losing its config
> (there are quite a few open bugs about this) and decided to take a look
> into it. This ended up in some reworking of the way plugin behaves...
>
> The root cause of losing the layout config is X resetting keyboard
> configuration to system defaults (normally in /etc/defaults/keyboard)
> whenever a new keyboard is detected. xkb-plugin listens to keyboard
> config updates from libxklavier and quietly updates its own settings
> whenever a config change happens; these new settings are then saved to
> .rc file when the panel issues the "save" signal.
>
> Forgetting about xkb-plugin for a moment, somebody needs to reset the
> configured keyboard settings whenever X changes them underneath.
> xkb-plugin could do that itself but it seems to make more sense to make
> xfsettingsd responsible for that since it's always there and xkb-plugin
> may or may not be used; besides, xfce4-keyboard-settings already allows
> setting up keyboard layouts and xkb-plugin effectively duplicates that.
>
> My changes follow along these lines. Keyboard layout settings are now
> fully controlled by xfce4-keyboard-settings; xfsettingsd listens to
> system keyboard config changes (through xklavier) and resets them if
> necessary (it also takes care to only update the parts of the config it
> controls, unlike the old xkb-plugin). The "new" xkb-plugin acts mostly
> as just a keyboard layout indicator, i.e., layouts are set up through
> xfce4-keyboard-settings only (xkb-plugin still controls changing layout
> per window/app atm but it learns about the configured set from xklavier
> rather than its own config). I've also made a number of other
> fixes/improvements while at it - the commit messages are hopefully
> fairly self-explanatory so I won't duplicate them here.
>
> I'd appreciate if you guys could take a look at
> https://github.com/igors/xfce4-settings and
> https://github.com/igors/xfce4-xkb-plugin and let me if you're ok with
> these changes or prefer any of them done differently. And please let me
> know if you'd rather have me submit the patches in a different form.
>
> Cheers,
> Igor

Hey Igor,

This is excellent news, such work has been needed for a long time! I 
should have some time to review at least the xfce4-settings changes next 
week-end (if no one does so first).

I agree with Liviu that it would be great if you would co-maintain 
xfce4-xkb-plugin, we need to discuss this with the current maintainer 
though.

Cheers,

Jérôme