In order to improve the maintainability of the xinput script in xinitrc and to make adding new Input Methods (IMs) easier in the future, Akira Tagoh and I recently came up with the idea to split all the individual IM code out of xinput and put it into separate config scriptlets that would be owned and maintained by the individual IM packages.
The idea is basically to replace all the IM specific code in xinput by something like this:
lang_region=$(echo $tmplang | sed -e 's/..*//') XINPUTDIR=/etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d if [ -z "$XIM" ]; then if [ -r ${XINPUTDIR}/$(LANG) ]; then . ${XINPUTDIR}/$(LANG) elif [ -r ${XINPUTDIR}/$(lang_region) ]; then . ${XINPUTDIR}/$(lang_region) fi elif [ -r ${XINPUTDIR}/$(XIM) ]; then . ${XINPUTDIR}/$(XIM) fi
where $XINPUTDIR would contain scriptlets installed with alternatives by the individual IM packages (htt, chinput, xcin, nabi, kinput2, skkinput, etc) and alternatives symlinks for each locale through /etc/alternatives to the default IM for it. For example:
/etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/hi_IN -> /etc/alternatives/xinput-hi_IN /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/ja_JP -> /etc/alternatives/xinput-ja_JP /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/ko_KO -> /etc/alternatives/xinput-ko_KO /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/zh_CN -> /etc/alternatives/xinput-zh_CN /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/zh_TW -> /etc/alternatives/xinput-zh_TW
[It is not sure whether it better to support symlinks for both ll_CC.ENCODING and ll_CC separately or not. Perhaps only ll_CC or even just ll is sufficient?]
and then for example there would be symlinks like
/etc/alternatives/xinput-hi_IN -> /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/htt /etc/alternatives/xinput-ja_JP -> /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/kinput2-canna /etc/alternatives/xinput-ko_KO -> /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/nabi /etc/alternatives/xinput-zh_CN -> /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/htt /etc/alternatives/xinput-zh_TW -> /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/xcin
[For FC the default IM would actually be htt (if installed) for all these locale, but I just put in various IMs here to illustrate.]
See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=119785 for more details and comments. Unfortunately it is getting a bit late now for FC2, so this idea may have to wait for FC3.
The only weakness of this compared to the current xinput setup that I can think of is that it doesn't allow for any fallbacks: eg if htt is running use it otherwise use kinput2 with Canna say instead. But in practice people don't usually switch IM all the time, and the flexibility gained outweighs this small loss. Also users can still easily override the IM configuration by setting XIM (and optionally also XIM_PROG and XIM_ARGS) in their ~/.i18n" file or system-wide in "/etc/i18n".
Comments and feedback on the scheme and design are most welcome.
Cheers, Jens