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

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2013-01-03 at 18:53 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Thu, 03.01.13 09:38, Adam Williamson (awilliam at redhat.com) wrote:
> 
> > 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:
> 
> Well, we still will allow configuration of per-boot, per-system and
> per-user keymaps, but at least only one for each (i.e. only X11), not
> two (i.e. X11+console).
> 
> > 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.
> 
> We'd drop the console keymap specific bits in /etc/vconsole.conf. It
> would stick around only for the font setting after that.
> 
> > It seems like ideally we should just have two configurations:
> > 
> > * system-wide default keymap
> > * user-specific current keymap
> 
> Well, certainly, but I think ther is benefit in allowing this to be
> overriden at boot on the kernel command line.

Oh sure. I guess I need to draw a distinction between what I see as two
different cases. Which I'm sure you understand but I'm having trouble
describing clearly. I guess what I'm saying is, if
there's /etc/keyboard.conf specifying 'KEYBOARD=foo', I should never
have to pass 'KEYBOARD=foo' as a cmdline to make foo my keyboard layout
in some case. As things stand I believe I do, for passphrase entry
during dracut.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net