Wine keyboard driver+XKB. What am I to do?

[Shachar Shemesh]

Oleh R. Nykyforchyn wrote:
> Hello,
> I need an advice on what to do with some piece of code that I have written for
> about 3 years. I started to make changes in Wine keyboard driver because I was
> not able to use MS Office under it on my Linux box (3 or 4 XKB groups, 2 overlay
> groups used, English, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, German and Polish
> layouts). First I submitted a patch that adds koi8-u encoding to Wine, and it was
> happily introduced. But my changes to X11DRV (now winex11) keyboard driver were
> large and I understand Wine people who didn't want to risk.  Meanwhile I
> continued to polish my implementation to correct bugs and improve performance.
> I am heavily indebted to people that tested my patches, wrote me about problems
> with them and suggested possible solutions. I thank to L.Rahyen that supported
> me in my efforts.
>
> Now patched keyboard driver allows user to:
>
> 1) have up to 4 XKB groups working (current code uses 1 or 2);
> 2) detect and use XKB overlays to put 2 or 3 close layouts (e.g. Russian,
> Ukrainian and Belarusian) into one XKB group;
> 3) freely combine available XKB layouts in any order, e.g. "en,ru,fr";
> 4) list all layouts available at the system, and implement
> ActivateKeyboardLayout();
> 5) notify an application (e.g. MS Word) about change of layout, and make
> GetKeyboardLayout() work really, not just return LCID for current locale
> of Unix box;
> 6) input characters that do not fit into current Unix locale, e.g. German and
> French accented letters at a system with Cyrillic (not UTF) locale;
> 7) override any of detected layouts via registry, if user is not satisfied
> with Wine driver choice.
>
> In fact I made cosmetic changes to 3 files in winex11.drv directory: x11drv.h,
> x11drv_main.c, event.c, but the fourth file keyboard.c was changed much more.
> About half of functions in it were rewritten, and it now easier to read new
> keyboard.c than diff output to understand the changes. 
>
> I got very reasonable advice from L.Rahyen to broke the patch into smaller
> parts. The problem is that I preserved the driver logic, but changed
> data structures, so any such patch (even very small one) will touch hundreds if
> lines across the whole file, probably introducing new bugs and being difficult
> to read and understand. Also, there is no reason to change code by a patch
> if we can benefit of it only after next patch.
>
> Now I will be grateful to any help. How can such big changes be introduced in
> Wine tree? I also attach a patch against wine-0.9.37 and copies of original and
> changed files. Perhaps somebody, who is interested in multilingual keyboard input,
> can test it and write me about results.
>
> Oleh
>   
Also, have a look at http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735, which
is an independent attempt to solve the same problem. It's a pity I
didn't know about your effort.

Shachar