Text Input Management System

[Kazunobu Kuriyama]

WARNING: This is under development and thus for experimental use only.
        Before trying it, please read the following intensively.

This is an effort to fully implement the Cocoa text input management 
system (TIMS)
in GNUstep:
 
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/InputManager/index.html

The implementation I put forward is far from practical use. Nonetheless, 
I'd like to put
forward it to you to hear your opinions before going ahead.  Rather, I 
absolutely
need your opinions to make up my mind to go ahead or do away with such 
an effort, because,
once GNUstep decides to adopt the Cocoa text input management system, 
the current
implementations of text editable objects plus NSResponder probably need 
to be modified
a little bit so that they can interact with a running input server.  
Without a consensus
of the community and supports from the development team, my project is 
likely to be
in vain.

To try the new TIMS, you need to reinstall -gui and install the input 
server program
GSInputServer.  After applying the patch gui.patch to the whole -gui 
source tree,
do a usual build and installation procedure.  The input server program 
can be installed
in a usual way; it will be installed in GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT/Applications.  
Then, say,
   $ openapp GSInputServer
   $ openapp Ink
to see how it works.

Before playing with it, make sure you can recover the genuine -gui at 
any time.
I can't guarantee the patched -gui always works fine.  Again, that is 
for experimental
use only.  In fact, the current implementation doesn't understanding 
even simple key
bindings such as Control-h (This is one of the TODOs).

The following are TODOs I recognize. If someone could suggest me how to 
fix them,
I'd greatly appreciate it.

(1) According to the Cocoa document, an input server program should be 
put under
   Library/InputManagers, not under Applications.  I don't know how to 
do this
   with -make. (If I do this with hand-crafted Makefile, is it possible 
to invoke
   an input server program with openapp?)
(2) Keyboard's autorepeating causes a segmentation fault. I guess this 
is due to
   my naive server-client programming because separate keystrokes look 
safe.
(3) Elaborate the implementation of NSInputServer so that it can deal 
with multiple
   clients in a safer way.

By the way, when I invoked Ink, I got a lot of messages like 'Ink[PID] 
autorelease is
called without pool for object (address) of class NS* in thread 
<NSThread: address)'
It conceivably relates to the IPC between the client and the input 
server.  On the other
hand, not all applications show this phenomena.  Does anyone know how to 
fix this?

Thank you.

gui.patch.gz
Description: application/gzip

GSInputServer.tar.gz
Description: application/gzip