Migrating console layouts to xkb

[Adam Williamson]

Hey, folks. This is a bit late, but I wanted to draw your attention to 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=837292 . The systemd folks 
and Vitezslav Crhonek are working on a plan to stop the insanity of 
having an entirely different set of keyboard layouts for consoles (kbd) 
and X (xkb).

The short-term plan is to replace the kbd layouts with a set of layouts 
that have been generated from the xkb layouts. There's a test package in 
comment #38:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=837292#c38

which Vitezslav was looking for some feedback on. I was hoping people on 
this list might be able to provide the feedback he wanted, and perhaps 
look at the changes in the package compared to the old kbd and see if 
you can see any issues with this approach.

Hopefully, once this is done, it will be a good solution to 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=889562 for most languages: 
we will no longer have the cases where you pick an xkb layout in 
anaconda and systemd-localed can't find any matching kbd layout, so you 
just wind up with a US English layout on consoles.

I believe there's a long term plan by which we really wouldn't have 
different input systems at the console and X level any more, which would 
make things even more awesome, but I don't know how close we are to that.

I am trying in general to get on top of the whole massively complex 
thicket of locale and language settings - through the stack, from 
systemd to anaconda to desktops - to see if we can get all the 
components singing from the same hymn sheet, but it's sure a lot to wrap 
your head around...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net