system-config-keyboard needs some loving, any takers?

[Marko Myllynen]

Hi,

> The mass posting of please check if this bug still happens
> with newer versions to F-13 bugs made me look at:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=545738
> 
> Which sadly still has not been fixed yet. While trying
> to reproduce 545738 I hit:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=646041
> 
> Which basically means that system-config-keyboard is
> not functional at all in F-14 and F-15, so it looks
> like s-c-k needs a new [co-]maintainer to give
> it some much needed loving, any takers?

well I'm not volunteering but instead throwing in even more ideas for
potential improvements.. :)

Currently there is far greater selection of keyboard layouts available
in xkeyboard-config than in kbd and it seems that the delta just keeps
on growing: when people submit new keyboard layouts they are adding them
just to xkeyboard-config, not to kbd (for reference one could inspect
for example the corresponding changelogs at [1] and [2]).

However, during installation the keyboard layout options provided by
Anaconda are based on kbd layouts, not the xkeyboard-config layouts.
This means that, e.g., for Finnish there are two options in the
installer menu (Finnish and Finnish (latin 1)) but then with
system-config-keyboard there are four different layouts available for
Finnish but none of them match to Finnish (latin 1) which could have
been selected during installation. The same goes for many other
languages as well. It might be even possible that there is an entire
language missing from kbd which is available from xkeyboard-config.
However, I haven't checked is this really the case for any language at
the moment.

It seems that Debian has solved this by offering layouts from
xkeyboard-config during installation and then generating corresponding
console keymap based on the selection on the fly with console-setup [3].

As said, I'm not volunteering to work on this area, merely bringing this
up. But if someone plans to take care of s-c-k it might also be worth
investigating should we do perhaps something similar as Debian does.

1) http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xkeyboard-config/log/
2)
http://git.altlinux.org/people/legion/packages/kbd.git?p=kbd.git;a=shortlog
3) http://packages.debian.org/sid/console-setup

Thanks,

-- 
Marko Myllynen