https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1405539
--- Comment #24 from Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek zbyszek@in.waw.pl --- = regenerating the initramfs =
I don't think regenerating the initramfs is something that we'd want to do, even if we had the machinery to do it. There are many components which influence the initramfs, and we do not recreate the initramfs automatically after updating any of them, except for the kernel. This is certainly debatable, since there are cases where it'd be nice to have the initramfs automatically updated, but there are good reasons not to do it, and at least current rules are clear: new kernel, new initramfs, other changes, old initramfs.
Also, even if we updated the initramfs, that'd be just the latest kernel (or the current kernel?), and the user could subsequently boot into a different kernel, and see the old keyboard settings. Updating all kernels would imho be a very bad, because it's slow and is incompatible with the idea of keeping old kernel+initramfs pairs as backup in case of regressions. If we updated multiple kernels automatically, people would be very unhappy.
Also, implementation would be a bitch ;) Right now the initramfs is automatically updated from within rpm. Doing it automatically from within systemd-localed means a completely different permission model, selinux configuration, and it'd be a break from systemd-localed being a simple distro-agnostic program. It doesn't seem like a good idea at all.
= not setting the system mapping =
Of course it would help tremendously if the system configuration was not edited by default for single user sessions, that would reduce the number of problems. Currently it's not even possible to set a session keymap without affecting global keymaps on single-user systems.
I'd lean this way too. I think explicit is better than implicit here, and people in general should be fine with keeping the keymap that the system was installed with unless explicitly changed. Not my area of expertise though.
= other options =
I think we should show they keymap in the password prompt. Possibly only if the user mistypes the password and the prompt is shown for the second time. We have (had?) something like this with CapsLock, where a little icon would be shown, and it helps a lot. This would apply for both the graphical prompt under plymouth and the text prompt under systemd-ask-password. In case it is decided that this is the way to go, I'll work on the patch for systemd-ask-password-console.