Arch Linux: How to handle patches which only you will use?

Question

I'm using freerdp together with xmonad and it has been giving me a lot of trouble.

The super key (or "windows key") is my mod key in xmonad and it has been interfering with my freerdp usage rather annoyingly. Whenever I switched workspaces (or did anything else in xmonad involving the super key), windows (controlled by the freerdp instance in focus) registered a keypress as well. This event combined with the loss of focus got the super key stuck in windows indefinitely: the press of the keys d and r would first show my desktop, then open the run dialog (as if I was pressing the windows key constantly).

I've tried several versions of freerdp, but all exhibited this annoying behavior. So I resorted to patching freerdp myself to just ignore the left super key on my keyboard. I love free software for a lot of reasons (especially the ability to alter things like this myself), however I still find it annoying to patch and rebuild freerdp on all version (and dependency) changes.

How do you deal with situations like this? Is there even a "right way" to resolve this issue?

Answer 1

Try reporting a bug to the original author, and if your patch adds something like a configuration option to choose if disable that or not, they might accept it.

If they don't accept your patch, the only option is to re-patch and re-compile at every release they do.