[Pkg-kbd-devel] Re: pkg-kbd project on Alioth to maintain kdb Debian package

[Anton Zinoviev]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 01:02:45AM +0100, Denis Barbier wrote:
>
> One more question: Why do you embed data from xlibs-data and xlibs,
> instead of Build-Depends on these packages?

The Fonts/ckb/ directory mirrors /etc/X11/xkb.  The ckb utility uses it in
order to generate console keymaps.  This directory is not used during
the compilation of the package, it is part of the binary package.  In
order to remove it from console-setup the X maintainers have to create
a small package that contains it.

Currently there are two more reasons that do not allow to use directly
the data from xlibs.  First, currently the ckb directory mirrors
/etc/X11/xkb of XFree86 4.3 and ckbcomp is tested thoroughly only
with this version.  For some reason it fails with some of the keyboard
files in X.org.  Second, the /etc/X11/xkb/rules/{xfree86,xorg}.xml
file seams to be buggy for some non-AT architectures.  Most non-AT
architectures are very old and it seams that X Window is not very well
tested on them.  I have to prepare a patch for this file.

The Fonts/locale/ directory mirrors /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale.  The
files in this directory are used to generate the compose sequences for
8-bit encodings.  This generation is not straightforward because the
compose sequences in X Window are much more powerfull.  The only
reason why console-setup contains it own version of this directory is
to make easy to compare this directory with the directory of X Window
when a new version of X Window is released.  Then for each difference
one should see how the program Keyboard/compose_translator behaves.

Anton Zinoviev

P.S. I started the manual in the doc/ directory but is is far from
complete. :-(