keyboard input in colortext

[Marcus Brinkmann]

Hi Kalle,

the next step needed for colortext is proper keyboard input handling.  So
far, it can read scancodes and convert them to keycodes (much like scan
codes, however, in an internal format that allows easy processing.  The key
is seperated from the state up/down).

As far as I can remember (I lost some mails between you and me, so it's
difficult to trace it back), you had problems dealing with blocking at read.

I think the proper way to go about it is to have a queue and a reader
thread, that consumes the keyboard input from the kbd raw device.  If the
queue is full, it can drop them and beep, for example, or do something else
(enlarge the queue, whatever).  This way, the reading from the keyboard raw
device, and the actual feeding of any reader of the colortext console are
completely seperated, and all blocking problems are also seperated.  The
actual code to do this correctly wrt select() etc can be found for example
in pfinet (ether and tunnel device), but also in the term translator.

I think the queue should not actually hold keycodes, but the characters that
end up to be read from the device.  This keeps the trivfs reading side of
the issue very simple, and also avoids some other problems.  This means that
the meta keys state handling happens on the side which puts the characters
on the queue.

The need for a queue is real, esp if you consider cases where a key expands
into a string (in Linux this is possible, it's a convenient feature for some
people, and it's easy to implement this if you have a real queue).
Extended scan codes will be easy to deal with, as the keycode is only put on
the queue if it is complete.

I will probably go for this strategy, if nobody else wants to beat me in
implementing it ;)

Then we need keymaps.  Do we take the ones from Linux?  I think there are
two projects, console-data and kbd-data, doe sanybody know what the
respective status of these projects is (eg which one is preferred, or better
suited for our needs?).

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de