Bug#686817: grub-pc: Add option to change keyboard layout

[Colin Watson]

severity 686817 important
thanks

On Thu, Sep 06, 2012 at 11:36:03AM +0200, Paul Menzel wrote:
> in my opinion it should be possible for the user to easily change the
> keyboard layout for the boot loader. Especially in 2012. So I put the
> severity to serious as I think this should be solved for Wheezy.

While I would like to get this fixed, I don't consider it RC.  Please
note that the "unsuitable for release" case for "serious" is "in the
package maintainer's or release manager's opinion" - feel free to appeal
to the release team.

In particular, this is not a regression from any previous version of
Debian, and there are so many other things to do in GRUB that actually
stop people booting, which is clearly worse than having the wrong
keyboard layout.

We're far enough along that advanced users can at least set this up
themselves, which is better than the previous situation.

> As far as my tests and my online search goes, that is currently not
> possible in Debian [1]. Fedora seems to offer that possibility and GRUB
> too [2].

Could you support your comment about Fedora with a reference to some
code or documentation?  While Fedora installs the grub-kbdcomp tool (as
grub2-kbdcomp), I don't see anything in their spec file that actually
makes use of it; so unless there's some configuration in a separate
package, they appear to be no further along than Debian.

> Probably #686815 [3] needs to be resolved for that first.

I don't see why; GRUB could reasonably offer keyboard layout
configuration only if console-setup is installed.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]