[oe] GTK+, disabled XKB a.k.a. why keymaps/ModeSwitch don't work well in GPE or XFCE

[Stanislav Brabec]

Hallo.

We just spent some time by debugging of an annoying bug - broken
Mode_Switch key in GPE and XFCE.

Surprisingly, the problem affects only GTK+ applications and it is
caused by --disable-xkb configure options in OE gtk+ recipes(*).

It
- made impossible to upgrade to the new version of kdrive on Zaurus
- now makes impossible to upgrade to Xorg on Zaurus
- causes keyboard breakage on Always Innovating Touch Book.
  http://bugzilla.alwaysinnovating.com/show_bug.cgi?id=41

So there is a question: Why XKB is disabled in OE GTK+? Does it have any
reason or it is a relict from the ancient age of kdrive based
systems(**)? If it is true, I propose a patch to remove --disable-xkb
not only from gtk+, but also all xorg-app and xorg-lib, or at least move
this option to distribution configuration.

Distributions that want to stay with XKB disabled probably want to use
xserver-kdrive <= 1.3.0.0. (Well, maybe newer kdrives can disable xkb as
well, but it caused strange problems on device with keyboard (keyboard
map required more tries before its loading succeeded, broken Mode_Switch
etc.).)

(*) Yes, it seems that there is either a bug while XKB-incapable GTK+
runs on XKB-capable X server, or there is a problem of combination of
XKB capable and incapable libraries, but it should not affect the
decision.

(**) If there is a demand, it is still possible to create gtk
+-xkb-less_*.bb recipes and build both variants.


________________________________________________________________________
Stanislav Brabec
http://www.penguin.cz/~utx/zaurus