Bug#673035: useless "No symbols defined for" warnings
Package: x11-xkb-utils
Version: 7.5+5
Severity: minor
xkbcomp warns whenever a keycode has been given a name but does not have
symbols explicitly defined. This happens a lot, because keycodes files
tend to name every keycode defined for their protocol, including many
obscure keys that most keyboards don't have. For example, the evdev
set results in a lot of
Warning: No symbols defined for <HIRA> (keycode 99)
Warning: No symbols defined for <HENK> (keycode 100)
Warning: No symbols defined for <HKTG> (keycode 101)
...
Warning: No symbols defined for <HELP> (keycode 146)
Warning: No symbols defined for <I147> (keycode 147)
Warning: No symbols defined for <I148> (keycode 148)
Warning: No symbols defined for <I149> (keycode 149)
It's OK to warn about this, but since it's a very normal situation
and doesn't usually represent an actual problem it should be a very
low-priority warning, that can be turned off without losing any of the
more useful warnings.
In fact it's implemented as quite a high-priority warning. It takes
"-w 3" to turn it off; "-w 4" or higher generates this warning.
By comparison, the warning for the reverse situation, where an attempt
is made to assign symbols to a key name that hasn't been defined, which
*does* generally indicate a real problem, is turned off at "-w 4" or
below, appearing only with "-w 5" or higher. So at "-w 4" you get the
useless warnings but not the useful ones.
Having this warning on means that any successful run of xkbcomp generates
screenfuls of useless warnings, thus hiding real warnings. Having this
warning off means that real warnings will be suppressed. Neither is
a good way to operate. The "No symbols defined for" warning needs to
be lower priority than other warnings, or independently selectable,
or just abolished entirely.
-zefram
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