Neo 2.0 as a separate keyboard layout or a variant of "de" and handling of "rules" files?

[Bernd Steinhauser]

Hi,

there is currently a keyboard layout in development, which is for german 
people, but it has nothing in common with the "normal" german layout qwertz.

There is a previous version of that keyboard layout integrated as the 
variant "Neostyle" of de.

Lately it came up for discussion on the Neo-Layout mailing list, if 
maybe Neo could be a separate keyboard layout, which might allow it to 
add variants of it to X.org, too.
(For example Neo 1.1, which is currently the Neostyle variant of de 
could be kept as the neo1.1 variant of Neo, and a One-Hand Neo (usable 
with one Hand only, similar to ENTI-key++), as well as a Neo 3.0 are 
planned, plus there are smaller variants for special purpose, too, 
similar to the "nodeadkeys" variant for de.)

Now the main question was if such a change (to add it as a separate 
layout instead of a variant) would actually be allowed.
There sure would be advantages for the Neo users, but maybe you X.org 
people say that that is a no go and it should be kept in "de", even 
though it doesn't have anything in common with the standard de layout.

The README file doesn't explicitly state, that there may be no 
non-language keyboard layouts, instead it says, that the name must be 5 
to 8 characters, but maybe in reality you would try to prevent the 
addition of such a layout?

So... thoughts on that?

The next question is about the handling of the rules files.
It seems that all major desktop environments only read out the base* or 
the xorg* files.
Now when a user wants to add his own, custom, layout, he has to replace 
these files, which causes problems if he uses a package management 
system, since those files would most likely replaced, if he 
reinstalls/updates the package.
The alternative is to not modify these files, but then it is not 
possible to use the layout switching capabilities of the desktop 
environment.
To improve this situation, I would suggest to not use rules *files*, but 
rules *directories*.
For example, there could be a xorg.d directory instead of the xorg* 
files, which contains the respective .xml and .lst files.
The difference is, that the actual layout list is not read from a single 
file, but from all files within that directory.
That would it make possible for a user to place his custom keyboard 
layout into a .xml and a .lst file within that dir and make it available 
for the desktop environment.

Regards,
Bernd