[Debian-hebrew-package] Bug#604290: kkbswitch removal

[Roman Odaisky]

> As the last upstream release was at 2005, and I believe there is a keyboard
> indicator / switch utility, I'm fine with removing this package from
> unstable/testing after the squeeze release.

To the best of my knowledge, nothing other than kkbswitch provides per-layout 
keyboard shortcuts and layout toggle mode in a GUI.

Example setup (one that I’m using):
– English, Russian and Ukrainian layouts;
— Ctrl + Caps Lock, Win + Caps Lock, Alt + Caps Lock to activate the layouts 
respectively;
– Caps Lock to toggle between last two layouts used in the current window.

Use case: typing something in Russian in one window and in Ukrainian in 
another. Access to the English layout is useful in both, pressing Caps Lock 
switches to it and then back to the previous language.

KDE offers the “spare layouts” feature that can achieve toggle mode, but 
there’s no option to set a shortcut for specific layouts (even MS Windows has 
this! :-). The workaround (qdbus org.kde.keyboard /Layouts setLayout <layout>) 
doesn’t work as it can only switch to non-spare layouts. Moreover, it’s 
impossible to use shortcuts involving Caps Lock in khotkeys.

Thus there’s no viable alternative to kkbswitch for such a use case. 
Admittedly, it’s uncommon, but not so because it’s not needed; rather, typical 
ways of setting up three layouts are inconvenient and users avoid them, not 
knowing of kkbswitch. I guess there’s quite a number of users with such a 
need, particularly citizens of bilingual countries or those studying foreign 
languages (native language + English + another language).

Besides, kkbswitch is easily configurable via GUI and does its job fine in KDE 
4 despite being a six year old KDE 3 application. It just works. Please only 
remove it after providing another means of solving the above problems.

Roman.