Bug 21044

Created attachment 24529 [details] [review]
3rd/4th level cleanup and new symbols.

In overview, the patch "adds" (see below) several accents and other signs to
3rd/4th levels of only the Cyrillic layouts in rs. Here is the draft of
"equivalent" (see below) change, new stuff in red:

http://caslav.gmxhome.de/misc/layout-cyr-xkb_rs_mod.html

The discussions of proposed change (in Serbian) here:

http://www.vokabular.org/forum/index.php?topic=3583.0

http://groups.google.com/group/sorta/browse_thread/thread/bf13e4de1e15ee44?hl=sr

In summary of these discussions, noone was against any of the additions.
Threads may seem longish, but significant amount of messages went to 1)
disproving about layouts as they are for being "unnecessarily different"
_from US (i.e. somewhat off-topic), and 2) motions for starting a
standardization effort of layouts on the state level, to supplement the
existing standard from late 80'es (I personally would rather try taming an
adult Arrakis sand worm through soothing language).

About the patch.

Actually, third and fourth levels (level3 partial symbols) of all variants
are now choke-full, such that it would not be possible to add anything on
any variant. I'm not exactly sure how this came to be, but I suppose it was
to make Latin variants includable for all of: rs, si, hr, ba, me. However,
for Cyrillic variants, which are used only by rs and as non-default in me,
many of the current 3rd/4th level stuff is plain useless. This is because
while one can type several, if not many, Latin languages using Latin
variants, Cyrillic variants are good only for typing Serbian and Montenegrin
(not even any other Cyrillic language).

So the patch removes all 3rd/4th level symbols those couldn't have possibly
been used while typing with a Cyrillic variant, and some duplicates, which
where possibly introduced to cater for other countries, none of which
include Cyrillic variants (with exception me, but I guarantee that, as of
now, any change worth for rs Cyrillic is also for me Cyrillic variants).
Thus the blue symbols in the layout draft above is what comes out after this
elimination, and the red newly added upon that.

Technically, I renamed level3 partial symbols to latlevel3, and introduced
cyrlevel3 with the above eliminations. By this no Latin variant is modified
in any way, and none of the other country layouts is affected (except me
Cyrillic variants, but with guarantees from above). It would be possible to
take out a common denominator, so that there is still level3 with 3rd/4th
level symbols common to Latin and Cyrillic variants, but I judged this to be
too micro-hierarchical, and it would not be totally obvious where to cut
(what should be common, and what is only accidentally common right now).

One main consideration behind the patch is to remove potential for hair-
graying upon the maintainer, normally expected when dealing with Balkanian
layouts :) The added symbols would benefit Latin variants too, but I didn't
dare touch them. I'll leave it to an interested party, able to solicit and
converge opinions from users in affected countries, or to argue for
splitting internal implementation across countries, or whatever.