[Pkg-kbd-devel] Re: pkg-kbd project on Alioth to maintain kdb Debian package

[Anton Zinoviev]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:03:04AM +0200, Denis Barbier wrote:
> 
> I told Konstantinos at debconf5 that this is not possible, and I am
> glad to learn that you did it ;)

It was quiet interesting task to invent how to translate. :-) I
created a small package with the script "ckbcomp" so you can test it
if you want.  Look at <http://lml.bas.bg/~anton/misc/ckbcomp.tar.bz2>
The script is used the same way as the "setxkbmap" utility.  For example

./ckbcomp en_US,bg,fr,el ,phonetic,, grp:toggle lv3:switch ctrl:swapcaps 

will dump on the standard output a keymap where the right Alt key
cycles around the US, Bulgarian, French and Greek layouts, the right
Control key selects the additional special symbols and the left
Control and CapsLock are swapped.

By default "ckbcomp" generates Unicode keymaps unless given the
argument "-charmap".  If the "-charmap ENCODING" option is given then
"ckbcomp" expects to find somewhere a file ENCODING.acm[.gz].  Most of
the files in /usr/share/consoletrans can not be used because ckbcomp
is very strict about the syntax of the ACM files so in the small
ckbcomp package I've included also "proper" ACM files.

The generated non-unicode keymaps include a file compose.CHARMAP.inc.
It can be found in the directory compose of the package.

It is possible to create a collection of precompiled keymaps that is
enough in almost all cases.  So in almost all cases it is unnecessary
to use "ckbcomp".  On the other hand only for the "AT" keyboards all
necessary precompiled keymaps are 1,9M compressed and we need also
keymaps at least for amiga, atari, macintosh_old, sun4 and sun5.  For
comparison the current /usr/share/keymaps is only 1020K.

> Sure, please do.  You have been added to the list of committers, but
> please import your current files into some 'trash' directory, say
> people/zinoviev for instance.  We will move it to a better location
> when we know what to do with it.

I don't know what command I have to use.  In the CVS there is still no
module to checkout.

> Keymaps only depend on encodings, and as you suggested below to only
> support UTF-8, keymaps do not depend on the current locale.
> I know almost nothing about fonts, so I cannot tell about that.

The fonts do not depend on the encodings.  They depend only on what
symbols the user wants to be supported.

> I had a quick look at packages with an interface::framebuffer tag
> (namely jfbterm, zhcon and fbiterm), and according to the BTS, their
> maintainers seem to be quite unresponsive, which is pretty annoying.
> Does anyone have some experience with these tools?

I agree, these tools are still not mature enough.

> > Currently the CapsLock key does not work properly in UTF-8 mode.
> 
> IIRC it works only for latin characters.

I think only for the ASCII Latin characters.

Anton Zinoviev