Rationalizing X and console keymaps and configuration (was Re: Fedora 18 issues with translations and keymaps)

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2013-01-03 at 15:43 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Thu, 03.01.13 00:03, Adam Williamson (awilliam at redhat.com) wrote:
> 
> > * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=889562 - systemd
> > conversion from xkb to console layouts fails probably more than it
> > succeeds, when it does, you wind up with U.S. English as your console
> > layout, not whatever you picked during installation
> 
> Here's how I think we should proceed on this one specific issue
> (i.e. the only one I am directly involved with):
> 
> I believe X11 keymaps on the console are the (long term)
> future. Unfortunately we have no tool that would currently fit the bill
> nicely, since Debian's existing tool pulls in Perl and is just a giant hack
> around loadkeys. Ideally we'd have a nice simple tool that replaces
> loadkeys and is capable of uploading X11 keymaps directly into the
> kernel's console driver, and preferably written in C.
> 
> However, console hacking is not particularly sexy as it appears, and so
> far nobody volunteered working on that. That said, if such a tool
> existed I'd be happy to hook it up with systemd in no time.
> 
> In the meantime, until somebody wants to spend the time on writing this
> tool I think the best is to update the keyboard mapping table that
> systemd ships. I am more than happy to apply patches to that and it's no
> issue at all updating this table in F18 at any time, including after the
> release.
> 
> I don't think it is worth delaying F18 for that.

Thanks. Branching off for this post-F18 discussion:

Given the impact of the bug I think we definitely need such a tool for
Fedora 19 onwards. If that means RH gets someone to do it, so be it, but
we need one. The current situation is not long-term viable.

If we have such a tool, can we make the whole area of keymap
configuration much less insane? Right now we appear to have at least the
following:

* Keymap passed in on the cmdline (for dracut env?)
* Console keymap configured in /etc/vconsole.conf
* System-wide X11 keymap configured
in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-whatever.conf (s-c-k, anaconda, and systemd
all seem to read and write *differently named* 00-whatever.conf's, for
bonus points)
* User-specific input configuration for each desktop (GNOME keeps its as
a gsettings entry, haven't looked at other desktops)

systemd tries to keep /etc/vconsole.conf and the X config in line, but
there's lots of room for things to go wonky there. And I don't think
that GNOME's config tool, at least, has any mechanism to propagate its
configuration 'down the stack' like it does for other settings.

It seems like ideally we should just have two configurations:

* system-wide default keymap
* user-specific current keymap

which can be read and written by all the involved tools, right? It'd be
nice if the desktops could co-ordinate on this too.

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