Keystroke flow in X.org

[Peter Hutterer]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 02:36:44PM +1000, Timothy S. Nelson wrote:
>  	Here's a rather mundane article with a good diagram that I just wrote. 
> It should probably be linked to from http://www.x.org/wiki/XKB but since I 
> don' tappear to have access to do that, I'm posting the link on the mailing 
> list instead.
> 
> http://computerstuff.jdarx.info/content/keystroke-flow-xorg
> 
>  	Also, if people with some clues about xkb could review it, that would 
> be great.

First - I appreciate that you wrote up some documentation and that you're
putting it online. However, in this case I'm really sorry to say this is
seriously wrong (and also a bit confusing).

Here's a few quick points:
- drivers don't have anything to do with XKB anymore (in git anyway). XKB is
  purely handled in the server now.
- the files in xkb/* are only read by xkbcomp to compile the original
  description, key events don't go that path at all
- the client still receives keycodes andn not keysyms, the KC->KS
  translation is done in the client after retreiving the keymap table (which
  is usually done before the events arrive anyway).
- scancodes == keycodes
- what you (I think) refer to are symbolic names for some keys used in the
  xkb description files. they have nothing to do with anything other than
  help mapping during the key table creation

Those are just the points I can find in a quick 3 minute read. Please take
this offline, I shudder at the thought of the collatoral damage of digg,
reddit or slashdot picking this up. In years from now we'll still have to
correct people that that's now how it works at all.

Sorry.

Cheers,
  Peter