On Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 10:15:22PM -0800, tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> 
> > On 2021-01-16, at 9:17 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 04:03:45PM -0800, tim Rowledge wrote:
> >> 
> >> 
> >>> On 2021-01-16, at 3:33 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> >>> . The part I
> >>> can't figure out is how it could be working on any of the VMs.
> >> 
> >> I can't see any case where it can work either but the code is so convoluted you need a native guide. The one thing I can see that might just possibly account for differences is the way that x2sqKey is a function pointer that can end up pointing to any of three routines depending upon assorted commandline options, environment variables and phase of a random selection of Jupiter's moons.
> >> 
> > 
> > Exactly right. Well it's not exactly a function of Jupiter's moons, but
> > pretty darn close.
> > 
> > I've narrowed the issue down some more, and can offer at least a
> > workaround for Scratch.
> > 
> > The reason that the key up events are being lost is that either the
> > LC_ALL or the LC_CTYPE environment variable is set. If you unset both of
> > these, the key up events will start working.
> 
> That's interesting. I had tried manually specifying the x2sqKeyPlain by using `-nointl` but it looks like it gets over-ridden pretty quickly. I see that on my Pi 
> `
> echo $LC_ALL
> en_US.UTF-8
> `

So we know that there is a problem in the X11 key handling in the VM
that is triggered if the environment variable LC_ALL is set. Scratch
is now encoountering this problem, whereas previously it had no problem.                
 
Most likely the thing that has changed is that the Linux environment
on Raspberry Pi (updated OS?) is now setting the LC_ALL variable to
support locale handling. Apparently Scratch worked fine without this,
so the workaround to avoid the problem would be to unset LC_ALL in
whatever script is being used to run Scratch.
 
I don't have a Pi to check, but most likely there is a unix shell
script somewhere, such as /usr/bin/scratch, that runs the VM and brings
up the Scratch image. If so, then you can add "unset LC_ALL" to the
script, and I expect that Scratch will be happy again.

Dave


> 
> So it looks like the big difference is use of XmbLookupString vs XLookupString. Since as mentioned "We can't use XmbLookupString() since that is undefined for key release events." I guess maybe we might try using XLookupString for handling key release events ? It will potentially be wrong for times when a composited character was used but it's really hard to imagine what *wouldn't* be wrong. Maybe one might take comfort in the thought that using a composited character within the sort of Scratch script that uses key states is pretty close to unimaginable. Actually... checking... yes, impossible since the usable keys are a-z,0-9,yp,down,left,right,space. Maybe there is something in that which can drive a useful heuristic?
> 
> Thanks so much for digging into this Dave.
> 
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> A flash of light, a cloud of dust, and...  What was the question?
> 
> 
>