ANNOUNCE: xkeyb 1.14

Dear all,

I am pleased to announce that xkeyb 1.14 is ready for download.

In this version, some pieces have been rewritten. And there are other 
minor changes as well:
- There's a new and single unified scancode translation routine, to 
replace the old, disperse and buggy one. This has fixed long term 
existing bugs, such as the ussage of Ctrl+INS, Ctrl+Del and Ctrl+other 
cursors, which has been a common complain for users of editors, and a 
problem existing with Shift+F4 and Shift+F5
- Minor fixes with Alt+NumPad and XString invokation
- The ASCII character F0h also needs some magic, and now there's support 
for it in xkeyb
- The packages are now better organised, more accordingly to the fd-dev 
contribution specs
- About the KEY files: there are not "autonomous" KEY files, this 
distribution includes the Reduced Layout Pack 1.00, meaning that the 
Reduced Layout Packs and xkeyb files have been merged in the binary 
distribution. Of course, the full layout pack 1.00 and future versions 
of the layout packs will be usable for xkeyb 1.14.

Now I want to make a couple of clarifications and comments:
- Contrary to what was said in xkeyb 1.13, xkeyb is NOT ready for APL 
software, nor it will be, due to a defect on its architecture that would 
be too hard to fix.
- Pressing AltGr+Del (RightAlt+Del) will cause the PC to reboot, because 
no distinction is possible between Ctrl+Alt and RightAlt. This is also 
another limitation of the architecture design of xkeyb, that is not 
possible to patch.
- On at least one PC around this world, the feature to enable/disable 
the keyboard by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 and Ctrl+Alt+F2 is not working 
correctly, and I haven't got the faintest idea of what's going on, 
specially because I can't reproduce this bug at all.
- Finally, the CGA stuff advised by Matthias on the Pause loop has not 
been introduced, that's a TODO.

Not only the first two points show limitations of xkeyb current 
architecture, but also some critical others, such as the lack of 
codepage support, are making me considering rewritting and redesigning 
the xkeyb engine to bypass these limitations. Similarly, I don't plan to 
add more features to xkeyb 1.XX, unless stupid bugs show up. Just note 
that (due to another limitation) it's possible to create ONLY ONE more 
version (xkeyb 1.15), as xkeyb 1.16, xkeyb 1.17, etc are NOT allowed.

I also need to write a decent webpage for users, that's another TODO.

Well, that's all. You can download the file as usual at ibiblio:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc- stuff/freedos/files/dos/xkeyb/

(see the readme.txt for more information).
Remember that the Reduced Layouts Pack 1.00 is already included in xkeyb 
1.14, you don't need that then).

Aitor