prefered way of configuring X11 keyboard layouts in F18

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Sat Dec 22 00:11:51 UTC 2012


On Fri, 2012-12-21 at 16:57 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:

> > The database is bitrotten and even it it wasn't most modern layouts do not
> > exist kbd-side at all. Most layouts with perfect mapping are old legacy
> > ascii layouts. They are still in xkb-config for historical reasons but in
> > many locales the preferred layout includes changes (unicodeā€¦) which have
> > never been ported to kbd.
> 
> I doubt it's that rotten. It definitely works fine for the most popular
> keymaps, such as the american and german. 

All this keymap stuff is bending my brain, but I've been poking at it
for the last few days, and I'm rather afraid it *is* that bad. See this
tentatively accepted blocker bug:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=889562

If I have everything right, anaconda is offering a keymap list that it
derives from xkb. I'm having trouble counting precisely how many layouts
it offers, but it looks to be definitely over 400.

According to 'localectl list-keymaps', systemd-localed has mappings for
209 keymaps.

So there's at least 191 keymaps (probably rather more) which anaconda
offers you but which systemd doesn't understand: if you install with any
of these keymaps selected as the default keymap (top of the list in
Keyboard spoke), you will wind up with US as your console keyboard
layout on the installed system.

We could really do with input from interested parties on exactly how bad
of a problem this is - if people could look through the keyboard layouts
offered in F18's Keyboard spoke and compare them to the list from
'localectl list-keymaps', and identify particularly important ones that
systemd doesn't seem to grok, it'd really help.

So far, I _think_ systemd is missing all Arabic layouts. It's missing
French (Canada). It's missing five Japanese layouts that anaconda
offers. It's missing Chinese, that's a big one. That's just scratching
the surface.

> Note that this conversion has been exposed via GNOME's kbd config thingy
> for a while, and we didn't really get much bugs about it, hence I assume
> that it isn't too bad.
> 
> I mean, if you see bugs, please report them, tell us what to fix. Other
> than that i can only tell you that the amount of bugs we got so far
> about this is close to zero, hence I can only assume things are not as
> bad as you say.

It's more likely to be that we have so many keymap bugs, everyone's
confused about what bug is what. That's certainly where I feel like
we're at right now.

> > If you really want to support console keyboard layouts in systemd, you
> > need to start generating console layouts from xkb-config, not adopt the
> > old anaconda mapping bandaid
> 
> I am pretty sure I don't want to work on this. But I'd welcome if
> somebody did work on it, and we'd be happy to support this in systemd if
> done right.
> 
> Lennart
> 
> -- 
> Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net



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