prefered way of configuring X11 keyboard layouts in F18

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-12-31 at 15:01 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:

> As discussed in the bug, if systemd-localed is doing 'fuzzy matching' it
> may be the case that we actually get a decent match for most layouts,
> I'll have to do more testing. But the situation is clearly different to
> the F17 one in that we are now relying on systemd-localed to map xkb
> layouts to console ones, where we really weren't before. There is
> certainly at least a potential for regression here. The systemd-localed
> list of keymaps may not have regressed but it has taken on more
> significance.

OK. Since that last mail I investigated things in quite a lot more
detail.

The big takeaway from that: the gap between 'kbd' and 'xkb' coverage is
just way too large for this 'mapping' solution to be practical going
forward. We really need the code to support xkb layouts at the console,
it is the only sane way forward. I have sent patches to systemd to
improve the xkb<->kbd mapping a little bit, but there are just huge
swathes of layouts xkb has which kbd simply does not have, and there's
no way to patch around that. We simply need to ditch kbd and have One
True Source Of Keymaps. This should be a high priority for F19
development. If I could write code, this is the code I would be writing.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net