users of xorg, in particular on FreeBSD 11.3

[Niclas Zeising]

On 2020-03-21 15:09, Eugene Grosbein wrote:
> 21.03.2020 12:36, Jan Beich wrote:
> 
>>>> On FreeBSD 11.3, the default configuration still requires the legacy ruleset.
>>>>
>>>> If you are using FreeBSD 11.3, or if you are using
>>>> xf86-input-keyboard on FreeBSD 12 or later, you need to change the
>>>> ruleset used by x11/libxkbcommon.
>>>>
>>>> If you have issues with your keyboard, most notably arrow keys, and
>>>> if /var/log/Xorg.*.log shows that the "kbd" or "keyboard" driver is
>>>> being used, you need to switch to legacy rules by setting the
>>>> environment variable XKB_DEFAULT_RULES to xorg.
>>>>
>>>> The easiest way to accomplish this is by adding it to your shell startup file.
>>>>
>>>> As an example, for users of [t]csh, put
>>>>    setenv XKB_DEFAULT_RULES xorg
>>>> in ~/.login
>>>>
>>>> For users of bourne type shells (sh, bash, ksh, zsh, ...) instead put
>>>> export XKB_DEFAULT_RULES=xorg
>>>> in ~/.profile
>>>
>>> Please consider improving x11/libxkbcommon so that it uses -Ddefault-rules=xorg
>>
>> x11/libxkbcommon is also used by Wayland e.g., in x11-toolkits/gtk30.
>> libinput as used by Wayland doesn't support anything but evdev.
>> If one enabled evdev(4) on FreeBSD 11.* then Wayland may work after applying
>> https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/kms-drm/pull/213

Last time I checked, there were plenty of patches needed to FreeBSD base 
to get evdev fully working, that is the reason I never enabled it by 
default on FreeBSD 11 when I did on FreeBSD 12 (before 12.1 release).

I'm not sure if we care about Wayland working on FreeBSD 11.

>>
>>> if OSVERSION notes 11.x at build time, so there would be no breakage for us building xorg from ports.
>>
>> Did you mean from binary packages? If someone builds xorg-server from
>> ports it's probably due to non-default options.
> 
> Or because one builds some other application due to its non-default options
> and xorg is built as dependency. Or any other reason field practice may impose,
> one can't guess beforehand.

This is just one library, I can see if it's possible to get libxkbcommon 
to behave differently on FreeBSD 11, as Eugene first suggested.  The 
xorg-server port already makes the distinction and uses the devd backend 
in the default configuration for device autoconfiguration on FreeBSD 11.

Regards
-- 
Niclas Zeising