Proposed release criteria additions for F14+

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2010-06-30 at 14:44 -0400, James Laska wrote:

> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_desktop_login
> 
> Perhaps demonstrating my familiarity with only keymap=us, but using a
> different keymap requires a different keyboard right?

Not in fact, no. Try selecting a UK keymap and hit shift-3. =) This is a
quick and easy way to do this test if you only have a US keyboard -
select the UK keyboard map and create usernames and passwords with UK
currency symbols in 'em. Most other symbols are the same (though \, >,
@, " and | move about a bit...)

(In fact the whole user-selected-keymap paradigm exists because
'different keyboards' aren't really that different. They all send the
same physical signals, whatever's written on the keycaps. This is why
you have to manually pick the right keymap to make what gets printed on
screen match what's written on your keycaps. If there was actually some
identifiable electronic difference between differently-labelled
keyboards, we wouldn't have to ask the user to select a keymap at all,
we could just pick the appropriate one automatically. 

I recommend not digging too far down this rabbit hole, as you'll learn
all about wonderful things like the fact that there's actually three
layers here - keycodes, keysyms, and then what's eventually printed on
the screen - and X gets in the way too. And dead keys and the way some
international layouts need three, four or even five layers of
characters...I did some work on keymapping for an unofficial port of
Android to the HTC Touch Pro 2, which is even more entertaining because
Android doesn't work like X at all and has its own odd conventions for
converting keycodes to keysyms to characters. Whee!)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net