[Pkg-kbd-devel] Bug#1070679: kbd: loadkeys: Unable to open file: de: No such file or directory

[Arnaud Rebillout]

Package: kbd
Version: 2.6.4-2
Severity: normal
User: devel at kali.org
Usertags: origin-kali

Dear Maintainer,

First: note that I'm not familiar with keyboard settings (I've always
used a US keyboard, so defaults work for me), so it might be a silly bug
report.

The bug was initially reported against the Kali bugtracker at [1]. But
it can be easily reproduced with Debian: just boot the Debian installer,
switch to a console, and try to use the command 'loadkeys'.

The issue is that 'loadkeys' (provided by the kbd package) doesn't work
out of the box.

    $ loadkeys de
    loadkeys: Unable to open file: de: No such file or directory

This happens because the package console-data is not installed. And the
fix is to install console-data, after that loadkeys works.

My question is therefore about kbd packaging, in particular the field
Recommends:

   Recommends: console-setup | console-data

Why a logical OR, why not recommend both packages? Then loadkeys would
be functional out of the box.

At the moment, users who want to use loadkeys have absolutely no chance
to guess what's wrong. The user message could be improved to say what
file is missing (assuming the program looks for a particular file), or
could even suggest to install console-data (that would be a
Debian-specific patch). Just some ideas.

Thanks for reading! Best,

Arnaud

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[1]: https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=8741#c19246