[etoys-dev] composition input change

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Thursday 14 Oct 2010 9:30:00 pm Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On 14.10.2010, at 03:49, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
> > Hi Bert,
> > 
> > The LANG check you introduced in etoys.sh will break Indic m17n fixes
> > because most Indic environments leave the locale as en_IN.UTF-8 or
> > en_US.UTF-8 and then choose the most appropriate language for a given
> > app. This is why I patched etoys.sh to use compositioninput if .UTF-8
> > encoding is specified in $LANG. Input encoding does not depend on
> > language code.
> > 
> > Subbu
> 
> But every Linux I know uses utf-8 now. E.g. German uses de_DE.UTF-8 and
> English uses en_US.UTF-8. Since I don't know what compositioninput does, I
> thought it better to restrict it to the languages you mentioned.
compositioninput flag is used by vm-display-X11 to use multi-byte input method 
instead of Latin-1 input method. This allows input method engines in Xlib to 
switch in different encoders for keyboard input without recompiling an app. It 
is required for m17n inputs. See XmbLookupString(3) and XLookupString(3) for 
details.

> So, how would it affect the other languages?
It wont. compositioninput uses locale settings and is backward compatible with 
Latin-1 input methods.
> I previously thought the encoding part of LANG referred to file names. I
> was surprised you thought it had anything to do with X11 input.
Encoding covers characters (LC_CTYPE). Legacy environments don't tack .UTF-8, 
so I am using it as a hint that the environment is more recent and will 
support m17n.

Given that Unicode is now widely accepted and implemented, we could use 
compositioninput as default and deal with legacy encodings as exceptions.

Subbu