Multi-key and deadkey setups

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2006-07-17 at 13:44 +0100, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Simos Xenitellis wrote:
> > Are you using GTK+-based applications?
> 
> This caught me out before. See the bottom of:
> http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/xkeyboard/
> 
> Why does GTK+ use it's own incomplete and inaccurate mappings?

GTK+ needs cross-platform input code because it runs on
on platforms (like directfb) that don't have their own compose
handling. That doesn't mean that that code needs to be used
on X (as Simos said, you can configure it to use the XIM compose
tables easily enough), though it's useful to have it
well-tested, but:

 - When I initially decided to use GtkIMContextSimple (the built-in
   compose handling), on Linux, UTF-8 locales weren't yet commonly
   in use, and Xlib is tied to compose sequences that can
   be expressed in the current encoding.

   At this point, UTF-8 locales are pretty much universal, at least
   on Linux, so there is little concern here.

 - From testing I did a long time ago, initializing XIM was quite
   expensive at startup, both in memory and time; my memory was
   that it was causing about 100k, per-process, of memory allocation.

   GtkIMContextSimple was much more efficient since it is a 
   static table compiled into the library, that can be shared
   across all processes.

   I haven't retested recently.

That explains "it's own", as for incomplete and "inaccurate", well, I
never got around to doing updates for the table. Simos has been doing
good work there to make up for lack of past lack of maintenance.

Regards,
						Owen