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List:       kde-bugs-dist
Subject:    [Bug 77928] Please set _MOTIF_DEFAULT_BINDINGS X property for Motif
From:       "S.Tringali" <tringali () yahoo ! com>
Date:       2004-05-07 0:53:12
Message-ID: 20040507005312.848.qmail () ktown ! kde ! org
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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77928      




------- Additional Comments From tringali yahoo com  2004-05-07 02:53 -------
This is a strange attitude.  Should you drop the control center and
have a bunch of text files the user can edit?  Novice users don't
understand that.  It's just requiring the user to retype information
the computer already knows.  Every time someone asks me "how come Page
Up doesn't work on Linux?" and I have to explain how to code up a
bindings file or X resource, I get blank stares.

Here's why that link you refer doesn't apply here: 1) Java is not a
session manager, but an application that runs in a session and 2) they
wouldn't have that problem if their session manager set the bindings
properly in the first place.  They are describing a workaround for the
exact bug I'm reporting.

The fact the first Motif application installs the bindings is a
last-gasp at trying to provide a usuable keyboard.  The system is
already broken at this point for nontrivial cases.  The application
knows nothing about the physical keyboard attached to the system.  In
fact, relying on this frequently produces wrong results.   It works in
some trivial cases where the first app is LOCAL, and you are lucky
enough to guess the keyboard type correctly.

An example:

Let's say you have a KDE session open on a Linux box, and, as today,
the bindings are not set on login.  Then the user logs into a Sun box
starts a Motif application displaying back to the Linux box.  That
application knowns nothing about the PC style keyboard hanging off the
X server.  Sun keyboards are Really Weird, with strange things like F39
where PgUp should be.  So the result is the user can't use Page Up.  
Probably none of the arrows work.  Or backspace.  Things that make
editing a text field hard to use.  Who gets blamed?  "This app is
junk."  But the app can't figure it out!  It cannot look at the
keyboard and see which key has the label on "Page Up".

The only hope is the user somehow configures the display that "I have a
PC style keyboard", and that information is communicated to Motif
somehow.  This property is the way it gets communicated.

Now, consider what should happen.  The session manager, whether it's
CDE, KDE, GNOME, anything sets the bindings according what keyboard it
knows it has.  This says to Motif: "The Page Up key is X Keysym Prior;
The key that erases a character to the left is BackSpace; The key that
does Escape is Esc."  On some other machine with a crazy keyboard, the
answer might be "The Page Up key is X Keysym F39; The key that erases a
character to the left is Delete; The key that does Escape is F11". 
This is not hypothecial.  I've seen systems like this.  Not every
computer in the world has a PC-style keyboard.

Maybe you simply get the bindings out the of text file that Motif
installs.  But maybe Motif isn't installed on the system, because most
free OS's don't have Motif.  But that doesn't mean the user will never
run a remote Motif app and display it there.  Where I work, we have a
pile of commercial Unix servers running Motif apps in the basement, and
there's a Linux box on everyone's desk where we remote display to.  



	
		
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